Chequers meeting will duck Brexit choice again

HERE’S a risky prediction: there will be no great Cabinet showdown on Brexit at Chequers on Friday. Cabinet meetings are supposed to be a boring formality. Week-in week-out, they just rubber-stamp decisions taken elsewhere, with compromises between different departments and party factions hammered out beforehand. The last time there was a dramatic bust-up round the actual Cabinet table was more than 30 years ago, when Michael Heseltine stormed out of Downing Street over the Westland helicopter affair (itself, of course, a proxy for Tory wars on Europe).

Anyone who walks out of Chequers will find themselves stranded on a country lane in Buckinghamshire. That’s not to say this week doesn’t matter. The fact of the Friday meeting is forcing a reality check across a Conservative Party that has become increasingly delusional about the Brexit negotiations.

Yes, Downing Street has worked up a compromise between the “Max Fac” and “customs partnership” versions of that deal which have so split the Cabinet. But that is irrelevant because neither options, nor a third way between them, are on offer from the EU — and never have been. Nor is there any sign the EU will accept Britain staying in a single market while rejecting rules on services and free movement, the outcome some thoughtful Remainers hope for. Brussels sees that as “cherry-picking” too. The great, promised, bespoke deal of frictionless trade with Europe, combined with “control” over borders, laws and money, will not happen.

So, after two pointless years, we are back staring at the options that the Cameron government set out before the referendum: a Norway-style membership of the European Economic Area, a Canada-style Free Trade Agreement, or just membership of the World Trade Organisation. Two years on, neither the Conservative Party nor the Labour Party can bring themselves to choose one. The Norway arrangement is almost certainly where we will end up, but formalising what Brexiteers would see as a “vassal state” and the requirement for free movement is too difficult for now. The Free Trade Agreement represents a cost to business that is too high, and imposes a hard border in Ireland that is unacceptable. The prospect of crashing out on WTO terms was what prompted the calamitous warnings from BMW, Airbus and Nissan, and no one serious in government is contemplating it.

So what will the Cabinet do when faced with these politically impossible choices? It will put off the decision. It will extend the so-called transition. In March next year we will leave the decision-making elements of the EU — no Britons at the European Council, Court of Justice, Commission or Parliament — but we will continue to sign up to all the rules they decide about our laws, borders and money for years to come. We will be in a semi-permanent frozen state, an existence with echoes of those unfortunate countries on the frontiers with Russia: neither in the union nor fully outside it.

It is what this newspaper predicted all along. There was a time when it was unacceptable to the Brexiteers. Then they blinked last year and the Cabinet agreed to a transition to 2019. Now the Brexiteers are blinking again and the transition will be extended to 2021. When we get close to 2021 they will blink again. Meanwhile, the uncertainty and indecision will continue to cast a pall over investment — and the British economy will continue to underperform.

A strong Downing Street would put an end to this dither and call out the weakness of the Brexiteers’ position — a weakness again exposed today by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s Lilliputian threats about a coup. A decisive Cabinet would come forward with a plan to join the European Economic Area, so we turn the neverending transition into a stable permanent platform from which we can rebuild British influence in Europe. That certainly won’t happen this week, though a Cabinet one day will make that decision. But nor will there be a great blood-letting at Chequers. Instead, when tea is served in the Elizabethan hall, they will go on pretending that they can all have their cake and eat it.