WTF Is Happening With Brexit: Theresa May Meeting Corbyn Could Be Suicide for the Tories

A story from today's papers? No – this passage was published on the 11th of February, 2019.

It's not you who is going mad. They are going mad. Your initial hunch was right. We have been here before. The "reaching out" strategy is about the fifth rung on the Cosmic Wheel Of Brexit, the eternal Escher staircase within which we're all trapped. It comes shortly after "ignoring a lost vote on May’s Deal" and "threatening to go ahead with No Deal". For those struggling to keep up, the next move is "Corbyn to reject May’s proposals because of mutual red lines".

That, after all, is exactly how it went down last time – at the 20th of March attempt at cross-party Downing Street talks, distinct from the failed 11th of February talks, or even the 15th of January "reaching out" – which Corbyn immediately snubbed.

Yesterday, ministers arrived at Downing Street for a cabinet meeting longer than a flight to New York. These snivelling wretches then immediately had their phones taken off them, and there followed what Downing Street described as a "wide ranging" meeting in which "everyone spoke". This decodes in the Big Dictionary Of Political Euphemism as “a big punch-up row”. Immediately after that, the PM took the precise opposite decision of the one her cabinet had just recommended. Business as usual.

We’re not supposed to know what happens in cabinet. It’s meant to be off-limits, so that ministers can come to good decisions rather than popular ones. Another ancient convention bites the dust: instead, we have a full 360 on everything, courtesy of ministerial leakers – a piece of nation-shaming oath-defying high treachery that nonetheless makes for a fascinating glimpse into the empty cockpit at the heart of government.

Fourteen ministers spoke in favour of No Deal. Ten spoke in favour of a long extension. Geoffrey Cox and Michael Gove – both of them Leavers – somehow decided to come across to the long extension side. It is a sign of quite how high tensions are running that they were immediately dubbed plants by the Brexiteers. "An obvious setup," one of many anonymous cabinet insiders told the Times.

Philip Hammond then suggested a second referendum or a general election in return for a long extension. Gavin Williamson said that reaching out to Labour was a stupid idea because it was not going to have any effect, and urged the PM to "head back to Brussels" (BREXIT COSMIC WHEEL KLAXON!) to secure some more of those delicious concessions that have been so forthcoming so far. A suggestion that – another source pointed out with galactic understatement – had left the PM "underwhelmed".

Andrea Leadsom then said that they should just impose direct rule on Northern Ireland and “call it something else”. And Karen Bradley, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, failed to point out that this was precisely what has already been happening there for two years.

Claire Perry, the business minister, agreed on working with Labour, claiming that some Tory MPs were “nutters”, and apparently spoke approvingly of the idea that the Tory party might split. But when Geoffrey Cox suggested she tone down some of those attacks, she accused him of mansplaining.

After seven hours, this bad-tempered pissing contest finally ended. At which point the media were treated to a victory lap of deja vu: Theresa at her lectern (they’ll need to burn it when she goes – it has become Pavlovian, a nation whimpers and pisses on the carpet when it appears). There, the Hypnotist-In-Chief told us all we were feeling sleepy, very sleepy, please, let your eyes go soft and your limbs limp, I will negotiate a workable agreement with Jeremy Corbyn we are reaching out to the Labour Party when you open your eyes it will seem like this is the first time you have heard this mediocre unworkable platitude, and BACK IN THE ROOM.

At this, even insiders lost the will to live. One anonymous “senior Tory” briefed that "she is making an art form of misjudgment – and in a world full of bad judgments this is a Rubens or a Van Gogh".

It’s definitely "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living". After two years of telling the world he was an unelectable Trot conchie who would boil Britain down for glue and rename it The People’s Democratic Banana Republic of Northern Venezuela, Mrs May wants to put her fate and ours in his hands. Corbyn gets the one thing he has always lacked: to look Prime Ministerial. She gets: another fatal dose of humiliation – one of these fatal doses must be fatal one day, right?

The talks are likely to break down for the same reasons they did before, and before that: politics. Corbyn’s number one aim is a general election, and his number one tactic is to sew maximum Tory chaos. At that, he has been remarkably successful.

And unlike the PM, Corbyn always gets to have his cake and eat it. The pair’s non-intersecting red lines make that a certainty. If Corbyn wants a second referendum – she will say no. If he wants to keep Free Movement – the logical conclusion of a “Common Market 2.0” Brexit – she can never go there. The only thing they clearly have in common is an urge to block off No Deal. The Tory electorate have swung firmly behind No Deal in recent weeks – if there is a quicker way to commit electoral suicide that doesn’t involve faeces-smearing, I do not know it.

It’s a mess entirely of her own making. The Tory whips’ lazy assumption was that the Labour votes they’d need to pass the deal would appear by sheer statistical probability – the logic being that with enough opposition MPs “hating Corbyn”, and, with many in Leave-voting seats, it’d be easy enough to pick off the 40-or-so she’d need to drag her deal across the line.

But Labour MPs have proved remarkably hard to shift out of their foxholes. They might hate Corbyn, but they know how badly the present morass is dragging down the Tories. So long as the rate at which Labour is damaged is less than the rate at which the Tories are drowning, they will hold the line.

Which is why, even as it starts to play out, ever-more eyes are moving beyond the latest sideshow. Brexiteers especially are pinning their hopes beyond the present 12th of April deadline. They hate it, but they’ll take a long delay, of a year or more, and they’ll take the Tory obliteration in the European Parliament elections that implies, because that is now the only way to eject the squatter from Number 10 and install a new PM.

We keep referring to this endgame in terms of historical comparisons, normally climaxing with the thought that it’s the “biggest crisis since the Corn Laws”. Students of history should well remember how that particular crisis ended – with the Tory Prime Minister Peel “reaching out” to the Whigs. After that fateful act of statesmanship, the Tories would not form another majority government for the next 30 years. Given how she’s “reached out” at least four times now – well, by my count that makes 120.

@gavhaynes