Friday, March 2/2018

Theresa May's much anticipated speech on Brexit - part whatever - proving largely that the driving force, as it was for her predecessor - is the unpleasant task of trying to satisfy a hopelessly divided and antagonistic cabinet. Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian has the metaphor for it: 

'When I was a young child I had a tantrum at a motorway cafe. My parents ordered for everyone, selecting baked beans on toast for me. I stamped my foot and demanded I choose for myself. I then proceeded to read the entire menu, holding up everyone, including an increasingly impatient waitress. Finally, I announced my choice: I would have baked beans on toast.

The memory of that episode returned to me while watching Theresa May give her big Brexit speech at Mansion House today. The speech was praised in some quarters for being serious and, by the standards of her government, pretty detailed. The main takeaway was that the prime minister had finally bidden farewell to “cakeism”, admitting that we couldn’t both leave the single market and have unchanged access to it. “Life is going to be different,” she warned.

But the speech also suggested that Brexit could end up rather like my strop at Little Chef. We would put ourselves and the rest of Europe through a great ordeal, only to end up with an arrangement rather like the one we could have had anyway, all for the sake of feeling in control. Except that, in this case, the end result would be both inferior to, and much more costly than, the dish originally on offer.'

Indeed.