Europe takes back control

What are we going to do about Theresa?

If you think this is a problem for the Conservatives and the House of Commons, try looking at it from the point of view of the EU.

The poor woman has ended up like Charles I in front of the so-called High Court of Justice in 1649. All respect for her authority has gone. Her former allies have been defeated, and those with the power to act – in this case the leaders of the European Union – are able to confront her safe in the knowledge that it is their version of the law that will ultimately prevail. All the prime minister has left is her dignity, which she pulls about her like a shroud.

The late king, you may recall, having lost the civil war, was on a hiding to nothing when he went before Cromwell’s hand-picked tribunal. His claim of sovereign immunity – based on his conviction that he, and he alone, had the right to decide England’s destiny and that none could lawfully dispute his authority – was summarily dismissed. The monarch, it was decreed, was not a person, but an office, whose occupant was entrusted with the power to govern “by and according to the laws of the land and not otherwise”. The subsequent proceedings, given the enormity of the occasion, lasted just long enough for the axeman to ensure that his blade had a properly sharp edge.

Mrs May will need all her dignity when she turns up at the EU summit in Brussels tonight. She has no friends there, save perhaps for the unlikely figure of Leo Varadkar, the Irish prime minister, who has been a constant thorn in her side but now wishes that his fellow leaders should exercise some measure of mercy in consideration of the wretch who stands before them.

Angela Merkel, speaking for Germany, may be disposed to join Varadkar in his charity. She values her country’s relationship with Britain and has no wish to see Mrs May decapitated outside the European Council in Brussels . At the same time, she has issues of her own to deal with back home, not least a faltering economy, and is fast running out of patience with her Downing Street counterpart. A postponement of the execution may be as far as she is prepared to go in the exercise of mercy.

Not so Emmanuel Macron, the would-be Cromwell in this sorry affair. Macron stands for France (or would do if millions of his fellow citizens had not rather obviously risen against him in recent months). He also represents “Europe” (or would do if his fellow leaders had not heard more than enough of his lectures on Ever Closer Union).

The French President has been humiliated by the response of ordinary people throughout France to his many lofty decrees and expressions of intent. But the humility he displayed in the immediate aftermath of the gilets-jaunes uprising has since dissipated. He appears now to feel that the worst is over and that it is time to move on. It should never be forgotten that the former schoolboy who seduced his teacher and went on to achieve one of the most starred baccalaureates of his year is a man convinced of his destiny, utterly ruthless in the exercise of power. He wishes to knock Britain out of the European game, leaving him as the western half of a duumvirate that rules the EU with whoever replaces Angela Merkel as the Chancellor of Germany.

He knows that France will feel the full, short-term impact of a Britain weakened by a ramshackle departure from the Single Market and Customs Union. But he is also counting on a significant boost to Paris as La Defence, in his mind, takes over from the City of London as Europe’s primary banker. Beyond that, he will be looking to Airbus to withdraw from the UK and to his country’s hard-hit carmakers to fill the gap that he believes will emerge in the European market as Japanese and German manufacturers draw down on their British investments and begin to repatriate their assets.

Is he cynical? Yes. Is he unmoved by Britain’s plight? Absolutely. Does he experience a frisson of pleasure each time Mrs May loses another round in her slogfest with Brussels? Without question. But he also sees the removal of Britain as a serious player in the world as a boost to France and therefore to him and his legacy.

Angela Merkel, by contrast, remains genuinely concerned that in losing Britain she is losing a valuable partner in the fight for a more rational, business-oriented Europe. She has watched in some distress as Theresa May lost round after round in a contest that has now gone on for the best part of three years. She will equally have watched as Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD opposition party in the Bundestag, excoriated Brussels last month for humiliating the UK and setting terms for Brexit that no British leader could willingly accept.

When the Prime Minister stands before her as a supplicant, pleading for mercy, Mrs Merkel may well feel a tear welling up in her eyes. She knows what it is like to be a leader under fire. She will also have sympathy for Mrs May as a woman brought up in the certainties of her father’s religion who came to power in a world of men. Beyond that, she will be painfully aware of the impact on her country’s exporters of a potentially impoverished Britain cast out into the wilderness. For all these reasons, she may very well cast her vote in favour of an extension to the Article 50 process, but she will insist, in return, that matters be brought to a swift conclusion, with Brexit suspended solely in order that the British Parliament and people purge themselves of their indecision and accept the inevitability of defeat.

All that being said, Merkel and Macron, are not the only leaders who count in Europe in 2019. There will be 27 voices at tonight’s working dinner, served separately, one imagines, to Mrs May and her team at a room off to the side. Spain goes to the polls later this month, and the outgoing prime minister, Pédro Sanchez, is demanding as the price of his support for a Brexit extension that Britain should reopen talks on the future of Gibraltar and guarantee continued access to UK waters for Spanish fishermen. He almost certainly won’t get his way. Pressure will be applied. But his voice, and that of his successors, will not be silenced.

Mark Rutte, the suave, highly respected Dutch prime minister, was for a long time deeply sympathetic to Britain. Like most of his countrymen and women, he is an anglophile by nature. But in recent months he has lost patience with Mrs May, even to extent of joking about her in public, and now simply wants to draw a line under a demeaning and painful process so that the EU can get on with its own domestic agenda.

The leaders of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia – the so-called Visegrad group – were once equally open to a generous settlement for the British – but, as the Westminster deadlock has gone from bad to worse, they have since hardened their stance, with firm guarantees for their citizens in the UK as the expected price of their acquiesence to any lengthy extension of Article 50.

Italy, still wrestling with the issue of mass immigration from North Africa as well as the slow implosion of its manufacturing and banking sectors, remains something of an unknown quantity. Its governing parties are populist by instinct and no friends of the European Project. But, like Rutte, they have had it up to here with the UK’s refusniks, who they see as taking up valuable time in Brussels that could better be spent sorting out issues which Britain has declared to be no concern of theirs.

In short, the EU has better things to do. Whatever else they may disagree on, they are all agreed on that.

Back in Westminster, MPs continue to believe that it is their debate and their decisions that must ultimately decide the outcome of Britain’s decision to leave the EU. This is a delusion. The time for that has passed. The Prime Minister may well depart Brussels in the early hours of Thursday morning with the extension she needs to achieve God-knows-what in the months ahead. But if she does, she will not go with the blessing of those who have granted her request. Instead, they will have made it clear to her in terms that even she will be bound to accept that either she does what she says she will do in the time they allocate to her or they will step in and do it for her. As far as Europe is concerned, it is called taking back control.