Britain approaching a May 1940 meltdown minus leadership

We are at that frustrating point in the arc of a British crisis when we know with certainty that, for all contemporary hacks can uncover some of the detail, it will fall to future historians to catalogue, define and explain fully how the rickety British state and its leaders got into (and hopefully out of) such a terrible tangle in the autumn of 2018.

With the aid of diaries, cabinet papers, and email traffic it will be possible in the decades ahead to build a meaningful hour by hour picture of this panicky phase of the Brexit talks when “no deal” looked like the most likely outcome. Look at how the the crisis of May 1940, when Churchill became Prime Minister, but might not have done, was pieced together. With hindsight we can see it in the round as a series of lucky escapes and deft improvisations made more effective because the system, the top of the civil service machine, worked.

Today, that system – the Whitehall system – is creaking and maybe worse. There was a glimpse of how serious the dysfunction is when Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab sensibly rushed to Brussels several weeks ago to kill off the deal arranged by senior civil servant Oliver Robbins. There was Brexiteer criticism of Robbins, prompting the then acting Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill to write an angry letter to The Times denouncing the Tory opponents of Robbins. It read like a “duty of care” letter put on the record deliberately by a worried employer. Retired mandarins responded with a letter criticising Sedwill.

Since then, Sedwill has been appointed in very strange circumstances this week as Cabinet Secretary. Sir Jeremy Heywood has retired. Remarkably, May said that because Brexit is an emergency she need not even advertise the job. Sedwill is a May favourite from their time together at the Home Office, where Robbins was also a senior securocrat. Incidentally, the reputation of that tenure – via the Windrush scandal and so on – is unravelling at remarkable speed.

The Prime Minister lacks confidence and needs Sedwill to boost her, we are told. That’s fine, or actually not fine, in normal circumstances. At a critical moment such a rushed appointment is a red warning light indicating high stress.

It is civil servants who set the direction of the British approach to the talks, getting May’s approval of course, with the cabinet given little opportunity until recently to object. Historians will marvel that so many of them sat there mute while this remarkable constitutional innovation was attempted.

Soon, we find out whether it has worked and produced a deal. Either the approach adopted by Theresa May and her closest officials, against the advice of former cabinet ministers and worried current cabinet ministers, is in the next six weeks going to be vindicated. Or it will not.

If the EU moves on a deal, and the Prime Minister can say with justification that Northern Ireland’s status within the United Kingdom has not been weakened, and that we are not locked forever inside someone else’s customs union, an unthinkable arrangement for a major world economy, then we should expect there to be widespread relief. In such circumstances May’s compromise would probably pass the House of Commons. Hardline Brexiteers insist that it will not, but I doubt there are enough of them to vote down a deal. Moderate Labour MPs are inclined to back a deal and to defy Corbyn, it seems. It’ll be tight in terms of votes, but a Brexit deal backed by May, Merkel and Macron stands a good chance of being endorsed when the alternative is an undignified shambles.

But what if there is no deal?

All along the planning for no deal has been poor. Ministers pressed the Prime Minister to sanction more of it, but the assumption from officials was that there would be a deal and that doing too much to plan for a failure of talks would send the wrong signal to Brussels. Efforts by the British government have been stepped up, but the recent assurances from the Transport Secretary Chris “Railway Timetable Reorganisation” Grayling that all is well are not reassuring.

The country is in a bad place to respond, not because no deal would be armageddon (it wouldn’t, more than 70% of the economy is domestic, we have our own currency.) The difficulty is that getting through no deal safely, or even through an emergency switch to EEA and EFTA,  if that is possible at this late stage, will require a personality at the top who combines organisational imagination, rhetorical flair, supreme confidence, experience and a dash of elan. That’s Winston Churchill, basically, and the great man is sadly unavailable for action.

There remains the slim possibility that May could in a meltdown present herself as the leader who tried, the leader who will not be bullied. Nothing is impossible. Yet with every passing week, with every botched initiative and alarm offering fresh insight into the dysfunctional state of the government, it becomes more and more obvious that for all she embodies duty May lacks elementary curiosity and is less imaginative than any Prime Minister in the modern era.

Knowing this, the officials around May have done their best to keep the show on the road under a struggling Prime Minister. This bumbling along is not the stuff of inspirational leadership that rallies the nation in an emergency. If the talks fail, a confused and angry country will need to be led through some difficult months.

One piece of advice that Winston Churchill gave to Georges Clemenceau about the poison of French politics during the First Word War was to forget old quarrels. Andrew Roberts records the exchange in his outstanding single volume life of Britain’s war leader published this month. “In England,” Churchill told the French leader, “we make many muddles, but we always keep more or less together.”

Put to one side the possibility that Churchill, typical of the imperial generation, had erred in eliding England and Britain. Perhaps he said England rather than Britain deliberately, having a particular form of Englishness – pragmatic, undogmatic, reasonable – in mind. Nonetheless, the core observation that we muddled along was sound.

Do we still in Britain keep more or less together? It doesn’t feel like it with the invective flowing, hatred between and within the various Brexit tribes getting worse, and a leaderless government flailing in search of a solution.

In such precarious circumstances, the Tories need to be ready with an alternative leader who can be installed by agreement, rather than elected, at high speed. Although all the options inside and outside the cabinet have their drawbacks, if May’s strategy does collapse into no deal, the wider Tory leadership is going to have to settle on someone who can pivot quickly to an alternative such as EEA or no deal contingency, explain the decision and lead with verve. Within weeks they may have to pick a leader from David Davis, Michael Gove, Sajid Javid, David Lidington or Dominic Raab, and just get on with it.