I can't be the only person who is confused by Theresa May's appointment of Boris Johnson to the Foreign Office. I am sure that the Foreign Office is too, for a start.
It is clear that May has decided that those who proposed Brexit should manage its consequences (Prite Patel, maybe, apart) and that Johnson, who many of them would have had for leader instead of her, should be seen at the top of that group. By doing this she has made it clear that she either wants enthusiasts in these jobs or that she is setting them up to fail: it may, of course be both.
My suspicion is that she thinks that the failure will be quick, and brutal. I have a hunch she will demand pre-negotiations. She knows she won't get them. And she knows Johnson, who will not be directly involved as this will be Davis' role, will nonetheless upset a lot of people quickly and whilst this process is going on. And when they fail to deliver progress - as the EU almost guarantees they will - she will use Johnson's growing list of gaffes to say that enough is enough, call an election and expect to win on the basis of proposing to stay in after all, and make clear that she then intends to shuffle them all out.
It's a high risk strategy. It could fail miserably. But that is true of just about all the options she faces, which means she has to have a way to get to a Plan B which is what she really wants without the U-turn that this will require appearing to be her fault. Make it Johnson's instead then during a period when she thinks her only opposition is internal because Labour will be mired in a leadership contest.
I might be hopelessly wrong on this, of course. I simply offer it as a hypothesis whilst suggesting that setting people up to fail has been a strategy known for long enough to think that in the impossible position she finds herself in May have decided to resort to such an unusual approach.
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You could be right; but I suspect it’s more that she’s following the old adage of “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”.
By putting key leave campaigners in roles where they have to deliver what they have promised, in almost impossible circumstances, she is completely neutralising many of her key enemies from the leave camp. She must know that the Brexit result completely called their bluff of criticising from the sidelines. By putting them in such key positions it stops them from either being able to criticise from the sidelines or claim that the government is being lead by remainers.
Yep. you got it in a nutshell
I think that is exactly what she has done, but, i think Boris might surprise everyone because he will also realise that is what she has done. Forewarned it Forearmed.
I *guess* that Johnson was persuaded to drop out of the leadership race to allow May to win, through either enticement or coercion, and this posting was his reward.
This would mean that Gove simply acted in the manner in which he was told to act, falling on his sword, for the party.
As for current plans, you may well be right. The strategy you propose would certainly “get the job done”
The interesting thing about this hypothesis is that, if it is true, Gove instead of being a traitor would actually be completely altruistic, sacrificing what is left of his reputation for the good of the party.
It’s also possible that Gove was fooled into thinking he could run for the leadership. An appeal to Gove’s own vanity set him up for the fall.
I had previously been equivocal about this possibility, or instead that Gove and Johnson stitched it up between themselves so that neither would have to be PM for Brexit. It was a very neat way to get Johnson off the hook for running. But Gove’s demotion to the backbenches makes this explanation seem less likely. Although, I suppose that Gove could get a quick return to the front bench, maybe some time next year.
The story promoted by the newspapers — that Gove betrayed Johnson — doesn’t strike me as likely at all.
It seemed strange to me that Boris Johnson’s nomination wasn’t already in when Gove played his 11th hour hand – I’m right in saying BJ had enough support well before that, aren’t I? Seems he never intended to stand, and I think Gove will reappear quite soon.
I think he will be one good excuse. The FCO desperately needs to find new friends around the world and Johnson is sure to make a pig’s ear of that. But she would need other excuses to call an election on the basis of staying in. Brexit would need to demonstrably fail for that. Whatever strategy she has it will be high risk, never has an incoming PM had so little room for manouvre on a key policy. My two cents is that it will because brexiteers never had a plan or even a unified vision of what brexit means. I liked her first words as PM, knowing detractors will be eager to quote them back to her “Brexit means Brexit”. Brexit at the moment is still undefined IMHO
From your lips to God’s ear
If she can push this all out beyond the planned boundary changes (reducing the number of MPs to 600) then more the better for her (especially as they’re ludicrously determined by registered voters rather than actual population).
If that is her plan, then for it to work, Labour and Lib Dems, would, surely, have to be willing to say ‘we will stay in’ and use a general election as a mandate for over turning the referendum.
It could also split her party as many of them would get out of the EU whatever the cost. The Tories were split over the corn laws and the Tariff Reform issue in 1905.
What a thought!
I do not believe any parrty could afford to ignore a general election call – the allegation of bottling out would stick
I believe Boris as been given the foreign office to keep him out of the way,so May can get on with the job of uniting Britain which the EU vote as exposed.Maybe being an optimist one hopes that May will put her words into action and not simply be playing politics to win over the electoral for a forthcoming general election.So let’s hope that May is the woman that can unite Britain,
kind regards Derek
p.s. I hear May is to visit Scotland
I had the same thought. I hope this is right.
However, if I take my optimistic hat off for a moment, it’s probably more likely she’s just insulating herself from Brexit blowback. Even those who believe Brexit is a positive for the UK must surely recognise that thing will get worse before they get better. So the odds are that in the runup to the 2020 election, the UK will still be recovering from a recession.
So what May has tried to do is put herself in a situation where:
– If negotiations go amazingly well and the Uk economy picks up quickly, May takes the credit
– If negotiations go terribly and there is a strong groundswell towards not leaving the EU, she can blame Team Brexit and put it to a second referendum
– If negotiations are mediocre (i.e. UK is worse off than before, but gets a lot of what it whats), then May can just say that she always knew Brexit would hurt slightly (so she campaigned for remain) but she fought hard to get the deal the British public wanted.
Yeah, there’s risk there. But at the end of the day she’s taken the PM job just as the UK economy is about to nose dive – there is no low risk solution on offer.
That’s a good assessment. I would also add the attraction of demoting and isolating ‘Team Brexit’ should they not perform well. Politically, that can be an end in itself.
I agree that they are being set up to fail.
That said, I find it hard to believe that wriggling out of Brexit is really the end point of a plan. The political costs of doing that are incalculably high (I mean literally we don’t know what they are, but likely substantial).
I actually worry more about Davis than Johnson. Johnson will be semi-neutralised by the machinery of government changes. Davis’s first words have been to reassert the old trope of “they need us more than we need them”. I call this the James Bond theory of international relations – every nation is desperate to drop its metaphorical knickers for the UK. This attitude, not Johnson’s gaffes, will be the real cause of failure.
“I call this the James Bond theory of international relations — every nation is desperate to drop its metaphorical knickers for the UK. This attitude, not Johnson’s gaffes, will be the real cause of failure.”
Yes, a thousand times over, I’ve thought the same thing myself – with the proviso that this arrogance, is an English, rather than UK wide phenomenon. This absurd grossly inflated sense of our importance was, and is, very evident among much of the anti EU crowd. The EU will be ‘desperate’ to give us a great trade deal because, apparently, if they don’t the German car industry will collapse, or the French wine industry will go under!
Whereas the truth is the opposite, of course, as any intelligent person can see. It is the UK that stands to lose from loss of access to the single market far more than the rest of the EU does from access to the UK market. Anyway, when you realise that much of the benefit we derived from the EU was from foreign companies basing themselves here because of our access to the single market, you can see just what a predicament we’re in.
The rest of the EU is, justifiably, angry with us, and determined not to let this nationalist contagion spread. Add to that they have scores of trained trade negociators and we have……..err, hardly any, and you don’t have to be a genius to work out that we’re not going to get a good deal. Not unless we give way on things like, say the free movement of people. Oooops!
“the James Bond theory of international relations”
That’s priceless, I love it. A remnant of empire probably.
The Tories are the party of wealth, power and absolute control freakery behind the scenes, so I’m sure the business negotiations for key positions would have been done over the weekend of the Leadsom/May motherhood debacle if not before, with Leadsom agreeing to back down in return for key positions for the Brexiters.
It won’t have been Leadsom and May having these discussions of course, the Tory party grandees and funders would have made those decisions behind closed doors and told their candidates what to do.
The Tory MP’s are all puppets of the dark princes after all.
I very much doubt that is true
Yeah, but it would make for a really good mini-series.
This is difficult to know. But I think it is clear that this was planned well in advance with the shift to the ‘centre’ (still an extreme one) well thought out as the ‘milksops’ were blatant and clearly designed to stem the Corbyn/Brexit anger factors.
Despite the turmoil in Labour and even the death spiral of the party, there is still fear in the Tory camp of what it might represent on the ground.
heads would have got together in rooms over this, I can’t see much doubt in that-these people knew the austerity/ fiscal surplus game was up.
No apology for the suffering caused just a brisk U turn. Reminds me of the time I met Liam Byrne and I gave him my rant on housing issues, he simply said ‘we got it wrong.’ Live’s turned inside out, debt slavery, hopes quoshed’ and oh…err…we got it wrong.
Marco perhaps we could encourage JK Rowling to write a new set of best sellers about this particular set of evil wizards and dark lords!
We know who all the bad guys will be but I’m still struggling to find a better Harry Potter than JC himself.
Or alternatively a replacent for Top Gear where May, Hammond and er Johnson (sorry Clarkson!) are reunited as Top Brass?
The mind boggles at the prospects!
Simon,
I don’t think politicians do apologies unless its for something that someone else did 50 or 100 years ago (like the Clinton/senate apologies for slavery and human experimentation).
The Japanese can’t evem bring themselves to acknowledge atrocities committed 70 years ago and Blair, just this week, was suffocating on his words accepting ‘responsibility’ but apology? No way.
Keith,
I had imagined that they’d go with someone like Helen Mirren as Teresa May and a fattened-up Rupert Penry-Jones as Boris, but I like your idea better. Much better.
Yes – a sort of ‘Game of Throwns’ (Note: the spelling is meant to be different).
I see Theresa May as a very canny and pragmatic politician and leader. I think she is instinctively hostile to the free movement of labour (noting her remarks on mass immigration at the past Tory conference) but ultimately in her pragmatic way she is willing to accept it for access to the single market. I therefore presume her position will be that she is unwilling to authorise any Brexit deal that results in less access to the single market or less of a role in security and other areas even if it gives restrictions on free movement. I think her pitch to Boris, Davis and Fox is effectively set out as ”Get me every single one of the good bits or we have no deal.”
In this way she is effectively supporting the Brexiteers and the wider Brexit argument but forcing them to live up to the promises they have made. If they can and they secure single market access with restrictions on free movement then May will happily sign any Brexit deal. If they cannot then she can a) refuse to sanction Brexit, b) say that she put Brexiteers in charge and gave it the best possible chance of success c) point the finger of blame at the Brexiteers who failed to get the deal they promised to the voters d) walk away from Brexit with as little damage to herself as possible.
You raised the idea of Johnson being set up to fail in comments yesterday. I noted that the idea seemed to be quite plausible and that it already occurred to others (including Johnson, himself, one would imagine).
The idea of creating a pretext to renege on Brexit raises the theory to a whole new level. The internal logic is perfectly consistent. Whether the expanded theory is plausible or not rests on the assumption that Brexit can in fact be overturned, whether that sort of reason would be remotely sufficient and whether the same Tory govt (new leader or not)could feasibly entertain the idea of reneging on their own referendum.
I would think that the negotiations etc. would have to go very very badly for that to appear viable. So badly that they would lose an election on that basis alone.
Makes sense. Think of Boris’s delusional article claiming we would get free trade and free movement for Britons in the EU but no free movement for Europeans in Britain. With remainers negotiating he could have continued to claim this was possible and criticise them for failing to get it. Now with the leavers negotiating when it turns out the best deal we can get is a Norway style agreement or just staying in, they won’t have anyone to blame but themselves.
I recall from my cowboy film watching days, if you want to pow-wow with the Indians, you’d be wise not to send someone with an established forked tongue. They wouldn’t take you seriously if you did, and would assume you weren’t really interested in achieving whatever it was you were purporting to be negotiating about.
On the balance of probability, then, I’d say the plan is for there to be no Brexit. May, the Remainer, trapped as she is in a morass of political constraint, can’t come right out and declare this, but I would suggest sending the fork-tongued Boris to smokum peace-pipe is clear indication of her aims. Once this sub-text is grasped by all involved, a measure of confidence in the UK will be restored, and market turbulence will settle down. Boris is not the messenger. He’s the message 🙂
Same line of thinking to me, I suggest
I’m puzzled what is meant by “fail” when what would constitute “success” hasn’t been identified – and can’t be because both words mean entirely different things to different factions.
The UKIPpers (whose following the Tories will be have to be able to lure away in large numbers at the next GE, whenever it comes) want nothing more to do with the EU on any terms, and least of all any involving backing-down on unrestricted control over immigration which is a cardinal principle for participation in the EU Single Market. They appear just to want out at any cost, and for Britain (or England) thereafter to go it alone.
The same undoubtedly applies to the more extreme Eurosceptic faction on the Tory back benches – and maybe to some on the front.
Would the EU offering generous concessions to the UK – a most unlikely contingency – be “success” and anything less “failure”? And who decides? Shall we have a panel of judges on TV like for ice-dancing, holding up cards awarding marks for “style” as well as for “technical excellence”?
Ultimately, I believe, public opinion will grope its way blindly towards some semblance of a consensus as to what outcome it will judge as having been a “success” or – more probably – an abject failure, and which party and which politicians it credits or blames, as the case may be. There will be no “fairness” in the judgments it makes and we shan’t know on what criteria the eventual verdict will be based until that time comes – or possibly not until after all the subsequent post-mortems have been conducted
And in regard to Boris Johnson’s richly undeserved selection, isn’t the most likely explanation that offered on a similar occasion by another Johnson – the consummate political operator Lyndon B. – that it was better to have X (I forget who it was) on the inside of the tent pissing out than the other way around?
I hope that May does not negotiate Brexit. David Davies is getting us involved the CETA treaty, the ugly sister to TTIP. See link below. I am now very worried. Corbyn was right to remain and reform. It was something that was plaguing me intensely, because while I did not like the neoliberal Maastrict and Lisbon Treaties which dictate government spending and borrowing from the Central Bank, the TTIP and CETA treaties are much more monstrous.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/15/uk-canada-advice-post-brexit-trade-deals-eu-ceta
I hear May is now declaring there’ll be no Brexit till a way can be found to make it work for the existing United Kingdom, including Scotland which is currently making lots of noise about leaving. The long grass it is then… stand down everyone, business as usual. Brexit alert over.
Now that is very interesting indeed Bill. Maybe the Tories have worked out that all EU inward investment would flow to Scotland leaving the UK in very poor position indeed?
I would love to be a fly on the wall on this one.
I think rather this will prove to be one of an endless stream of excuses for not implementing A50. Sound the horns, gone to earth 🙂
My 13 year old daughter and 11 year old son have been getting involved in this business too – watching the news (usually Channel 4) with us and of course they are still young enough to be led by Mum and Dad (but not when it comes to music and fashion sense).
But even they have questioned why is it that the BREXIT lot have got good well paid jobs in Government even though they have been implicated in the telling of so many lies during the EU campaign.
It has not been too hard to explain to them why Fox, Patel and Johnson have got jobs but given that they are always being told at school to work hard and be honest their cognitive dissonance with it all is perfectly understandable.
To be seen as being rewarded for misleading people – I mean what is this country coming to?
Heaven help us all.
…out of the mouths of babes…
Coming to this late-sorry! Piece in the Graun made the point along the lines of ‘Whatever else you read be sure of one thing – the No.1 item in the Prime Minister’s In Tray is ‘how to fudge Brexit’.