Solipsistic, dangerous and unpredictable as ever, Donald Trump commanded centre stage at Davos on Friday. Sober, conscientious and careful as ever, Theresa May played only a walk-on part when she made her own visit to the World Economic Forum earlier in the week. In one sense, it is no surprise that an American president generates a more powerful force field than a British prime minister. The US is a huge global power. Mr Trump, even when he stays on message as he did in his speech, is the world’s newsmaker-in-chief. Britain and Mrs May cannot compete with that. Yet the contrast between the packed Davos hall for Mr Trump and the sparse turnout for Mrs May the day before also reflects something very contemporary not something preordained. It tells us Britain does not matter as much today as it did before the Brexit vote.
Try as the prime minister may to persuade the global audience that Brexit Britain, leaving the European Union and striking out on its own, remains a major player, it simply does not look that way to many elsewhere. They see only a nation engaged in tragic and avoidable self-harm. In a weird part of her own Davos speech Mrs May argued that Britain’s commitment to global trade and international engagement was proved by the UK’s role in championing the EU’s trade deals with Canada and Japan and by our role in enlarged global partnership deals. Yet this is the UK that is simultaneously walking away from that same EU and its multilateral partnerships under Mrs May’s leadership. Right on cue, the weirdness was underlined on Friday by sluggish UK growth figures of 1.8% for 2017, compared with the eurozone’s 2.2%.
The logical response to this decoupling and decline, assuming that Brexit goes ahead, is clearly to ensure that it takes place as softly, gently and with as little damage as possible. The chancellor, Philip Hammond, made that very case in Davos this week, arguing that Brexit means “taking two completely interconnected and aligned economies with high levels of trade and selectively moving them, hopefully very modestly, apart”. For saying these entirely sensible words to a business audience, Mr Hammond unsurprisingly provoked calls from Brexit zealots that he was destabilising the government, being cowed by the European Union and hamstringing the economy. He was then given a slap on the wrist by Mrs May, whose office announced that the government’s plans “could not be described as very modest changes”.
This reprimand comes in the same week that Mrs May has had to face down her foreign secretary too. On Tuesday, Boris Johnson told the media that he would speak up in cabinet for higher spending on health. When he got to the meeting he encountered eight ministers denouncing his freelance approach before he could open his mouth. The upshot of two such high profile provocations, neither of them heavily punished, has been predictable. There has been a sharp revival in Conservative leadership speculation at Westminster. Cue a media one-two by the freshly minted leadership hopeful Gavin Williamson. The new defence secretary simultaneously made public a private-life skeleton from his cupboard to the Daily Mail and chilled the nation’s spine with a lurid Daily Telegraph warning that Russia would kill us in our thousands were it not for Mr Williamson’s constant vigilance.
The last thing that the Tories need is another leadership contest. Just because Mrs May’s weakness has been cruelly exposed this week in Davos and in cabinet, it does not mean that her divided party is any closer to uniting under a different leader, including Mr Williamson. This is a broken government with a broken strategy. Thoughts that it might do important logical things in the national interest, like agreeing an organising strategy and goal for the UK’s relationship with the EU after Brexit, look forlorn. Mrs May seems interested only in holding her party together long enough for Britain to exit the EU in March 2019; everything else about the country’s future appears subordinate to that ambition, whatever the risks. Mrs May’s premiership is the embodiment of Britain’s June 2016 decision not to be taken seriously. No wonder the crowds went elsewhere in Davos.
