Her current policy — to threaten to walk away from talks if the EU doesn’t accept her Chequers plan — is not taken seriously in Brussels. EU leaders can see that the UK is hopelessly unprepared for no deal, and reason that she’d be stopped by her cabinet, parliament or both if she tried it. May’s colleagues worry that she is in denial, and so they are making their own plans. One of those intimately involved in the government’s contingency planning tells me, ‘No deal cannot be our only Plan B.’ [...]
Even the handful who still defend Chequers in private, as well as in public, admit that things are now more difficult. One cabinet minister concedes that the EU’s approach at Salzburg was a ‘very successful negotiating tactic’. Another cabinet member says the Chequers plan has done its job: to show the government had made an effort, in good faith, to negotiate as close an economic relationship with the EU as possible. ‘You’ve got to be able to say to the Remainers that we tried.’
There are some in the cabinet who still loathe Brexit and regard Chequers as the UK’s opening offer. Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, is expected to push to stay in the customs union and makes no attempt to disguise his concerns about Brexit. In cabinet meetings this week, he complained that a restaurant in his Surrey constituency can’t hire enough staff to wait all the tables — proof, he said, that the UK needed low-skilled immigration. But as one exasperated cabinet minister put it to me afterwards, it didn’t seem to have occurred to the Chancellor that maybe the restaurant should just pay its staff more. And that the balance of power between workers and low-wage businesses might be precisely why so many voted for Brexit in the first place.
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