Williamson mauls Barnier
MINISTERS rounded on Michel Barnier yesterday after he rejected Theresa May’s Chequers deal.
The EU’s chief Brexit negotiator has said he is ‘strongly opposed’ to the Government’s Brexit plan.
But arriving for the Cabinet meeting at No 10, Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson said: ‘Michel Barnier doesn’t know an awful lot about British politics.’ In the Commons, MPs urged Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab to abandon the plans, saying it was hopeless to continue faced with Mr Barnier’s opposition. But Mr Raab said they were being ‘used’ by Mr Barnier to undermine the Government’s negotiating position.
AS Lieutenant Colonel George Custer did not quite tell his men at the Battle of Little Bighorn: ‘ We don’t roll over just because we’ve got a bit of push-back’. Those were the words of Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab yesterday when asked if he realised Theresa May’s Chequers proposal was opposed so strongly by the European Commission that it was a floater.
‘Dead in the water,’ was the description of pro-Brussels Stephen Kinnock (Lab, Aberavon). Quite a few Eurosceptics also made plain their distaste for the Chequers thing. It is a policy with few friends.
‘We don’t roll over just because we’ve got a bit of push-back,’ murmured Mr Raab. His tone was the same throughout his Statement which updated MPs, fresh back from the summer recess, on the state of the Brexit negotiations.
Slim, high- browed Mr Raab insisted things between him and the EC’s Michel Barnier were going reasonably well. ‘ We’ve injected some additional pace into negotiations,’ he said.
A neighbour of mine concluded that this must mean they had started speaking faster.
As regards to startling talk of disaster, Mr Raab said ‘in a negotiation there are efforts to put pressure on all sides’. He also described continued worries over the Irish border as an attempt to create ‘leverage’ over London. He asserted, with the slightest growl, that ‘that won’t work’.
Mr Raab, with his otherwise level voice and calm demeanour, could have been an airline pilot coming on to the intercom to reassure passengers that an appalling bout of turbulence, which had seen the in-flight trolley on the ceiling and the cabin crew flung all round the galley, was really nothing to worry about. ‘Hello there, folks, this is Captain Raab. We’ll soon have you comfortable but for the moment please just return to your seats and fasten your belts as a precautionary measure’.
At which point the oxygen masks leap out of their overhead lockers and the plane’s engines start making the low whine of a Stuka divebomber. Actually, Mr Raab was rather effective. He has a lawyer’s grasp of detail – much more so than his Labour opponent, Sir Keir Starmer, who is supposed to have been a hot-shot lawyer but who consistently under-impresses in the Chamber.
If there was a theme to yesterday’s exchanges, it was a certain deflated air among the Europhiles. Some of them met M Barnier on Monday and they now seem depressed. It was a measure of the extent to which Mr Raab’s aura of lawyerly competence hypnotised the Chamber that when he said ‘the scope and the contours of the agreement are now clear’ he was not washed away by mockery. Scope, contours: these are peachy words, meaningless but freighted by a certain technical character.
Civil servants use such terms to baffle ministers. Mr Raab was using them to anaesthetise the Commons.
SIRKeir did not say what he wanted instead of the current impasse between Brussels and London. He was just generally peevish, like a child short of sleep.
Some of the backbench champions of the two sides of the argument (Europhile Anna Soubry and her gang, Jacob Rees-Mogg and his) were absent. Instead we heard from the likes of former Northern Ireland Secretary Owen Paterson, who said the Irish border question was not a real problem – a point firmly reinforced by Nigel Dodds of the DUP, who said some anti-Brexit people were just using it to create mischief.
Emma Reynolds (Lab, Wolverhampton NE) worried about the EC telling European car makers to stop using British components. Mr Raab suggested that was just negotiating talk and told her she should ‘show a bit of mettle and stand up for this country’.
‘If there’s no deal, do we get to keep our £39billion?’ asked Philip Hollobone ( Con, Kettering). Maybe, said Mr Raab.
Chris Bryant (Lab, Rhondda) wondered what queues we would in future use at airport passport barriers. My sort of question. Mr Raab said that would be up to the Home Secretary.