Chinese whispers are not helping Mrs May

Civil servants usually stay in the shadows, advising ministers but never proffering their own view of policy. Brexit has thrust Olly Robbins, the chief negotiator with the EU, into a limelight he would probably prefer to avoid. His seemingly incautious comments to colleagues in a Brussels hotel bar, overheard by a television journalist, have reignited speculation over the direction of Government policy. Ministers were forced to deny his apparent assessment that the only two options for Brexit were Theresa May’s deal, if and when it is amended by further talks with the EU, or a lengthy delay to the UK’S departure.

To most observers of the Byzantine machinations surrounding Brexit, what Mr Robbins said sounded plausible, even likely. The Government’s stated policy is to leave the EU with a deal. Mrs May’s difficulty is that the agreement she reached with the EU was emphatically rejected by the House of Commons last month. She is now seeking changes to the Irish backstop arrangement in the expectation that these will remove certain objections and see her deal over the line.

She evidently wishes to keep open the prospect of the UK leaving without a deal in order to exert pressure on the EU side to make concessions. The reason Mr Robbins’s comments have caused such consternation is that they suggest this is a false threat: the Prime Minister has no intention of taking the UK out of the EU without a deal and would seek to extend the Article 50 process if it looked as though this was about to happen.

This matters politically because Mrs May has consistently resisted pressure in Parliament to state that she would delay the UK’S exit if there was no deal. These apparent contradictions are causing fresh tensions in the Conservative party, after a period when a rapprochement between the various factions seemed possible. This may have implications for how Tory Brexiteers vote in the Commons today on a motion to endorse the Government’s approach.

During Prime Minister’s Questions, Mrs May reiterated her view that, if necessary, the UK would leave on March 29 without an agreement and she urged MPS not to pay heed to “what someone said to someone else as overheard by someone else, in a bar”. It is a sad indictment of the lack of clarity surrounding her precise intentions that so much credence is given to precisely that.