Salzburg: the humiliation of Theresa May

Things seemed to be going Theresa May’s way in the run-up to last week’s EU summit in Salzburg, said Daniel Capurro in The Daily Telegraph. After the failure of the hard-line Brexiteers to produce a much-touted alternative plan, momentum appeared to be growing behind the PM’S Chequers strategy, which her chief Brexit adviser, Olly Robbins, hailed in a BBC documentary as “a gamechanger”. Nobody expected a breakthrough at Salzburg, but they were confident that EU leaders would make encouraging noises to help May through the Tory conference, clearing the path for proper negotiations at a formal EU summit in October. So it came as a shock to everyone, especially No. 10, when European leaders instead let rip. Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, baldly declared that the Chequers plan “will not work”; President Macron of France talked of Brexiteers being “liars” who had “predicted easy solutions”.

The seeds of May’s humiliation were sown at dinner on the opening night of the summit, said Michael Savage in The Guardian. At the end of the meal, the PM gave a speech in which she read from her op-ed that morning in the German newspaper Die Welt and “repeated a mantra on Chequers that is anathema to the EU: take it or leave it”. The next day, after May irritated leaders with further prevarication over the Irish border, the bloc made it clear that it was “not taking it”. Tusk rammed the message home by posting a photograph on Instagram of himself offering cake to May, with the caption: “Sorry, no cherries.” The summit was nothing less than a “cynical group monstering”, said Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail. “Kick kick kick. And this is how they treat a vicar’s daughter who was trying to be helpful.”

Spare me the “faux-wounded” bleats of the Brexiteers, said Clare Foges in The Times. This was no devious “ambush”. EU leaders have made clear from the start that they won’t allow Brexit to undermine the integrity of the single market. “Short of projecting this in lights on the Brandenburg Gate, they could not have made their position clearer.” So why did May not see this diplomatic rebuff coming? Some insiders have accused Robbins, who was in charge of masterminding her summit strategy, of advising her badly, said Oliver Wright in the same paper. Others have blamed May for being “inflexible” and not heeding advice. But whoever’s fault it was, the fallout from May’s diplomatic misstep, and from Tusk’s ungracious Instagram message, which went down very badly in London, has “left both sides shaken”.