May’s ‘high-stakes’ game as the clock runs down
THERESA May is deliberately running down the clock on Brexit, the Irish Government believes, but it fears her ‘high-stakes’ strategy could backfire and spark an ‘accidental no deal’.
Top government officials here have suspected for months that the UK prime minister will try to waste time until her parliament is forced into a choice of backing the Withdrawal Agreement, or less desirable options such as no deal or a second referendum.
No majority exists for either choice in Westminster, but the Irish Government is not taking for granted that this will lead to May’s original agreement ultimately being backed and a dreaded nodeal being avoided. ‘It’s very high stakes,’ a high-ranking source told the Irish Daily Mail, ‘And it might not play out as she thinks.’
In a statement to the Commons yesterday, Mrs May asked for ‘more time’ to secure legally binding changes to the backstop for avoiding a hard border on this island – changes which have already been ruled out repeatedly by Dublin and Brussels. She also admitted the final date for Westminster to have its say on Brexit could be pushed back to March, just weeks out from the date the UK is due to leave the EU – on March 29.
This has reaffirmed the Irish Government’s belief that Mrs May is now actively wasting time in an audacious bid to secure support for her Brexit deal.
‘She keeps going back and forth over the same points. The backstop isn’t going to be changed, yet again today she’s talking that up,’ a source told the Mail. ‘We’ve been back and forth on this endlessly. It looks very much like she’s running down the clock to force her parliament into a choice.’
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has repeatedly warned that a no-deal Brexit could well happen by accident rather than design.
And Mrs May’s gamble on running down the clock could cause an ‘accidental no deal’, some officials fear. However, others hope that a no-deal Brexit will have been taken off the table by then.
One source said: ‘The closer we get to March 29, the more costly decisions businesses are going to be forced into. If she takes no deal off the table, businesses can avoid those costs. We expect her to come under a lot of pressure in that regard as the clock runs down.’
But there are other reasons to fear that the UK could ‘accidentally’ crash out of Europe – one being a widely held belief that Europe will blink before they do.
Senator Neale Richmond, Fine Gael’s European Affairs spokesman, told the Mail that many UK officials he has spoken to are ‘absolutely convinced’ that the EU will eventually cave over their insistence on the backstop.
‘Even at higher levels, Boris Johnson and people like that seem to be absolutely convinced that the backstop is open for negotiation. It’s not,’ he said. ‘That was made clear to Theresa May on her visit to Dublin last Friday and indeed earlier last week by Brussels. I don’t know what she expects to get.’
Mr Richmond admitted that even if Ireland, or Europe, believes Mrs May is simply wasting time, they cannot refuse to engage in talks.
‘If someone asks for talks, you can’t exactly say no. A lot of what we’ve been saying in talks for the last eight weeks has been covering the same ground over and over again,’ he said. ‘They’re not listening to what we’ve been saying for the last 18 months.’
‘Accidental no-deal could happen’