Doggedness has sometimes served Theresa May well in the past two years. Yet, as this phase of the Brexit process reaches another crunch point, that same doggedness may now be her undoing. On Thursday the prime minister met a series of officials in Brussels. Her purpose was to try to fettle her Brexit deal in ways that the European Union can accept and Conservative MPs can vote for. The EU’s purpose was to stick to its November 2018 deal while remaining open to additional formulae that truly can get through the Commons. The talks with Jean-Claude Juncker were described as “robust and constructive”. This was predictable, since both sides need to show that they are sticking to their opening positions while at the same time looking for agreement. There will be more talks in the coming days. But the reality is that this approach is running out of road.
The moral and political bankruptcy of this approach was apparent from Thursday’s joint statement. It made clear – just as it has been clear from the EU side ever since November – that significant changes to the withdrawal agreement are simply not on the table. The EU27 will not reopen the agreement, Mr Juncker said flatly. Mrs May’s hope, therefore, is to extract some form of commitment on exiting the Northern Ireland backstop, alongside the existing text, that will persuade enough of the 118 Tories who voted against her last month to change their minds. This looks likely, if it happens at all, to take the form of some kind of legally binding version of the letters that Donald Tusk and Mr Juncker published in January.
For some rebel Tory MPs this may suffice as a way of implementing the so-called Brady amendment for which they overwhelmingly voted last week. For others in the rightwing European Research Group, however, it would simply sound the death knell of this phase, since they are dedicated to removing the backstop altogether. That isn’t going to happen, because the EU27 will not shift on it. Mrs May admitted this reality in Belfast on Tuesday. She repeated it in meetings with MEPs in Brussels on Thursday. The 27 are not looking for a compromise to the agreement. They are dealing with a country that is leaving their union. They mistrusted Mrs May’s embrace of the Brady amendment right from the start. They still do. The bottom line is that her prospects of getting the “substantial and sustainable” majority she needs if she is to get any deal through the Commons based on Tory and DUP votes alone are still vanishingly small. This makes the danger of a no-deal outcome much greater.
This is where Jeremy Corbyn’s shift of policy on Brexit this week comes in. On Tuesday, the Labour leader wrote to the prime minister offering a softened version of his longstanding conditions – which he wants written into law before Brexit – for supporting Mrs May. His letter is a pro-soft-Brexit package. But its softness is more apparent than real. The real bit is that it spurns the 48% who voted remain in 2016. It also says nothing about either a second vote or a deliberative attempt to resolve Brexit differences. But the Corbyn letter does not offer anything to Mrs May either. Its conditions seem calculated to be unacceptable to her. There is no mention of freedom of movement in it. The possibility of a Norway-style EEA agreement is ignored. It simply invites the prime minister to split the Tory party in order to make a Brexit deal that might also split the Labour party. Mrs May is therefore unlikely to accept such an invitation.
The effect of Mr Corbyn’s letter may in fact be to strengthen Mrs May’s attempt to chisel out a tweaked version of her original deal. Her aim is still to persuade her rebels that her tweaked deal is the least bad of all the options, ranging from no deal through to a soft Brexit and a second vote. Her approach is what it has always been, a mean-minded attempt to tie Britain to a departure from the EU that contains no meaningful guarantees for jobs, the economy, future generations and their place in the world. The millions who want Britain to be close to Europe, and who might have been persuaded to accept a serious soft-Brexit option, are being sacrificed on the altar of a fraudulent, short-term political fix to keep the Tory party factions together on the night.
