Theresa May was also in France at the end of last week. She held talks with Emmanuel Macron at the Fort de Brégançon, a Mediterranean retreat for French presidents since Charles de Gaulle. Or rather, she talked and he listened. The disparity in how much was at stake for the two leaders shone through every account. The British prime minister was depicted as desperate for help from European capitals to rehabilitate a Brexit plan that is only a few weeks old but already ailing. There was no sense of Macron needing anything in return; no discussion of how he should play it.
Many French media reports digressed on to the symbolic question of Brégançon, how it was back in play as a diplomatic stage after a period of neglect. The semiotics of presidential power were more of a talking point than anything the president himself might actually do about Brexit. [...]
No one in Paris, Berlin or Brussels doubts that Brexit is dangerous for the EU and that the failure of talks would be disastrous. But what those who seek to mobilise that prospect for leverage in the negotiations fail to appreciate is how the whole threatening idiom – defiant swigging from the bottle marked “no deal” – completes the picture of a nation losing its balance, sliding out of control. British politics has turned crazy and the craziest politicians wave their craziness around as proof that they should be taken more seriously. The red-eyed, slurring drunk offers to demonstrate his sobriety by pouring out another drink without shpilling a shingle drop. [...]
Or maybe we just haven’t hit the bottom yet. Maybe British politics just has to ride out a few more cycles of mania and denial. It resembles an addict’s compulsion to keep going, to repeat the degrading pattern again and again, because carrying on feels easier than stopping; because to stop would mean a brutal audit of harm already done, relationships ruined, money squandered, poison already ingested. It is a painful reckoning, but not one that can be postponed for ever.
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