All the hype and shillelagh shaking came to ... nothing
SETBACK for Fixers! For hours yesterday they assured us a deal was imminent. Rolling–news channels went into ‘moment of history’ mode. TV correspondents tried to contain their glee. Dublin’s Taoiseach was so keen to rush to work, he forgot to put on a shirt.
In Brussels, when Theresa May arrived for lunch with Jean-Claude Juncker, the wine waiter must have been fingering his corkscrew like Wyatt Earp checking his Colt .45.
Were the Europeans trying to bounce lunch guest Theresa into accepting a dodgy agreement? Or was she trying to mislead Democratic Unionists? Only a fool tries to bounce an Orangeman.
Midday went and the fervour built. The Juncker- May lunch began and the starter apparently slipped down a treat.
But then, hundreds of miles away in Co Down, DUP leader Arlene Foster came stomping down the cold staircase at Stormont.
As Dexys Midnight Runners didn’t quite put it, ‘Come on, Arlene’.
Mrs Foster was flanked by MPs Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, smouldering, and Nigel Dodds, bouncing on his toes.
Her voice sounded shaky, maybe with anger or because she had been hurrying down a corridor and her fitness regime is not what it might be.
She said, so firmly not even a Eurocrat could fail to understand, that Northern Ireland could not accept different status from the rest of the nation. And zat, mes amis, was zat. ‘ Pop!’ went the media- political world’s bubble of baloney.
Over-anticipation, hype, vapours and shillelagh- shaking had produced… nothing.
European officialdom smashed into that ancient intractable called parliamentary reality. Mrs May needs Arlene’s MPs more than she needs M Juncker. So it’s au revoir JeanClaude, at least for the moment.
In Brussels, Dublin and London, elites made fools of themselves by becoming over- confident about things not yet formally accepted.
Downing Street did try to tell reporters on Sunday night, when the story caught light, that the European Commission was running a little ahead of things. In the zeal – zeal for a concession from the Brits, perhaps – those warnings went largely unheeded.
Before doubts set in, Irish MEP Mairead McGuinness stood outside the European Commission in Brussels and told TV viewers, ‘we’re definitely in a much better place than we were yesterday’.
Depends where you were on Sunday, Mairead. Meanwhile, the world was having to cope with the sight of her boss Leo Varadkar being driven to his office in a vest or gym singlet. Shudders. It’s a new look for Taoiseachs.
I think I preferred Eamon De Valera’s undertaker suit. Whoosh! That sound you heard in the middle of Mrs May’s lunch was Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, jumping to conclusions about Ulster having different trading conditions from the rest of us, and instantly demanding equal status for Scotland.
Whoosh! Off went another idiotic rocket, this time in London where Mayor Sadiq Khan, idiotically, demanded the same for his city. Pfffft! A damper squib went off in Wales some time later, when Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones also joined that game.
Sometime before M Juncker’s waiters served pudding, word of Mrs Foster’s fulminations reached the May lugholes. Some time later, JeanClaude shuffled out on to the stage of the Brussels press room and said no agreement was reached.
HE claimed Mrs May was a v. tough negotiator, etc., but she may not be his obstacle. Mrs May, in dramatic lipstick (a darker, bloodier hue than normal – unless it was red-wine stains) was clipped and succinct as she said ‘on a couple of issues some difficulties do remain’.
The way M Juncker gestured to her when it was her turn to speak was freighted with weariness.
In Dublin, Mr Varadkar, now properly dressed, claimed ‘there is no hidden agenda here’. Ha!
By now the BBC’s Remainerish business editor, Simon Jack, was a picture of wild-haired despair.
And at Westminster, as Tory MPs poured out of a briefing, the only ones with a ready opinion for the good scribes of the Press were, you guessed it, Anna Soubry and Jacob Rees-Mogg.