Janet Daley

The elevation of the Irish border question to an Insoluble Problem has blocked our clean exit

In a wild moment on Friday, during that interminable wait for Theresa May to emerge at last for her press conference in Brussels, I had a splendid vision of her stepping to the podium to make a stunning announcement. “In view of the EU leaders’ decision that there can be no alteration of the legally binding backstop provision in the Withdrawal Agreement,” she would say, “I have regretfully decided that the UK will engage in no further formal negotiations, since retaining the backstop in its present terms is clearly unacceptable to the British Parliament. We shall be leaving the European Union, as stipulated by Article 50, on March 29 2019. If at any time before that date, the EU Council and Commission would like to reconsider the position, we shall, of course, be willing to reconvene our discussions.”

That’s it. We’re out of here. Goodbye and good luck.

But no. What she actually said was even more startling. In fact, it was quite surreal. Her very, very brief statement – followed by a very, very short question session – simply stated that everything you thought you had seen happen over the previous 24 hours had not really happened at all. The EU leaders had not ruled out any possibility of amending or adding an additional proviso to the Withdrawal Agreement. They had not, in fact, rejected any possibility of meeting the UK government’s request for some concession (even a rhetorical one) on the Irish border backstop – even though their appointed spokesmen, most notably the charmless JeanClaude Juncker, had explicitly stated that this was the case. No, you got that all wrong.

What is actually true, according to Mrs May’s forcefully delivered pronouncement, is that the “further clarification” she requested, which may or may not be legally binding, would require more time. As she put it, using her favourite locution, “we are continuing to work on this”. (Who is the “we”? Us and them jointly? Or just us, trying desperately to come up with an acceptable form of words?) There is, she reiterated stoutly in the great May tradition, “more work to be done”. There was some codswallop about the EU having given the “clearest statement yet” that the backstop would be temporary, but that means nothing more than it meant the previous week: it has no legal force that any court would recognise.

You bet there is more work to do. There is a real uphill task, for those of us who are trying to stay sane, in reconciling the reality that the EU could scarcely have stated with more brutal clarity and the weird rendition of it that Mrs May was offering up with no hint of self-doubt. Certainly there is some play-acting here. The EU may actually be less united than their frontmen make it appear. Rumours abound to this effect. Mrs May might be delusional but then again she might be consciously bluffing. One thing we have learnt for sure is that everybody is telling lies much of the time and that nobody is as confident about getting their chosen outcome as they wish to appear. But there is, as this column has suggested before, another possibility that is both more coherent and more sinister.

That is, that running parallel with the official negotiations being conducted by the UK government there has been a dark operation by Team Remain that quietly busied itself in the corridors of Brussels. Its most spectacular success has been the elevation of the Irish border question to the status of Insoluble Problem when, as has been argued with much evidence and eloquence, it is really a fiction. The EU has, with diabolical ingenuity, managed to construct a logically insoluble conundrum and then demanded that the UK government supply a solution within those terms which is, by definition, impossible. It categorically refuses to accept that the problem is not conceptual or grandly doctrinal at all but practical and that, with modern technology and political good will it can be readily managed.

The EU seized on this issue – of which they had been, in the innocent early days, totally oblivious – with joyous alacrity. As did, needless to say, the Irish Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, who has seen himself propelled from the outermost fringe of the EU’s consciousness to international stardom.

The secret negotiating strategy of Team Remain is beginning to come out of the shadows now that its chief architects sense they are close to triumph. Who wouldn’t want to get the public credit for such a brilliantly masterminded project? Listening to Tony Blair on the BBC’s Today programme last Friday, it was clear that he could no longer be bothered to maintain his usual faux diffidence. Handing out his helpful advice to Mrs May, he almost (but not quite) gave away his active participation in the game. The Brussels leaders he talked to, he said, were indicating that they were ready to consider reforming the whole immigration policy, which they now recognised was a pan-European problem. Such reforms could, he implied, give good grounds for reassessing our decision to leave, hence the need for a second referendum, blah-blah.

There is, we should note, absolutely no evidence for this: every single statement on the subject from Donald Tusk, Michel Barnier and Jean-Claude Juncker has stridently emphasised the necessity of maintaining the free movement of people as essential to the “integrity of the single market”. But the important – and indubitably true – admission was that Mr Blair is talking to EU officials on a pretty regular basis. Team Remain is emerging into the light because it is on a roll. Its fifth columnists on the government side have played a blinder. All they need to do now is wait.

God knows this is all very depressing. But if you despair of the Conservative Party, you might recall that it reached a similar nadir under Edward Heath, who resembled Mrs May as a personality: socially inept and stubborn to the point of pig-headedness. He was followed by Margaret Thatcher, who went on to prove that the country was neither ungovernable nor in permanent decline. Never give up hope.

Team Remain is emerging into the light because it is on a roll. Its fifth columnists on the government side have played a blinder. All they need to do now is wait