Back to School. May starts on the first stage of establishing a Brexit strategy for the Government

For Cabinet members, if not for schoolchildren in England, summer is now over. Theresa May has convened a meeting at Chequers today at which the first steps towards a Brexit strategy will be taken. Ministers have been ordered to offer up initiatives which will demonstrate how leaving the European Union can be an opportunity for the UK and not merely a challenge. That language will be witnessed again at the Conservative Party conference where politicians who asserted early this year that Brexit would be the worst thing to strike Britain since the Black Death will now “reposition” that rhetoric to emphasis their deep respect for the decision made by the British people on June 23rd and their determination to make the UK the Hong Kong of the North Atlantic. Not only does, to echo the Prime Minister, “Brexit mean Brexit” but “We are all Brexitiers now”. Unity will be the watchword.
The conclave at Chequers today will, though, only be the start of what will inevitably be a lengthy, complicated and at times divisive process. Party and parliamentary management will be an absolute imperative, not least because the dire state of the Labour Party means that “true believer” anti-EU Conservative MPs know that they can be as vocal as they like without fear of the credible accusation that they are assisting the Opposition through their endeavours. The Cabinet, although it is radically different in its composition from the one which David Cameron had assembled, is similar in that the vast majority of its members (including the Prime Minister herself) campaigned in favour of staying in the EU, albeit with quite different levels of enthusiasm and intensity. Mrs May seemed at times so reluctant an advocate of the remain cause that she offered the impression that if she had had the chance to walk in Switzerland for most of the April-June period then she would have done so. Yet she will be well aware of the risk of the charge of “betrayal” if she does not deliver an approach to leaving the EU that the vast majority of Conservative MPs deem to be sincere and to be credible.
The political mood in Whitehall has already switched a number of times in the almost ten weeks since the result of the referendum. The initial response was one of shock and horror. Back in late June many ministers, mandarins and MPs (including some of those who had backed Leave) feared that the economy would endure a 2008-style meltdown and that the political difficulties involved in departing from the EU would prove impossible to manage. The fact that Mr Cameron had rendered himself a caretaker Prime Minister and the Labour Party was openly imploding did not help matters. The Establishment was on something close to suicide watch. Sentiment then swung around swiftly as the Conservative Party ignored its own rulebook and installed Mrs May as its leader at warp speed with Mr Cameron and his acolytes such as George Osborne and Michael Gove all but vaporised. That elation was then checked by the realisation that none of the challenges that the UK was about to face had actually been rendered any less substantial by having a Prime Minister in place seven weeks ahead of the originally anticipated schedule. A month on, however, partly because of the perceived effectiveness of Mrs May’s initial tour of European capitals but reinforced by fresh confidence that either the short-term economy will be more resilient than expected, or even if it is not then that the measures which the Bank of England has introduced and which the new Chancellor could assist in his Autumn Statement will work, Tigger is in the ascent over Eeyore in the corridors of power again.
It is in that context that the Cabinet conversation at Chequers today is taking place and is reflected in three interesting developments in the debate about Brexit that have taken place during August. They are likely to prove influential in the very high level outline strategy that will emerge in the next few weeks and in the positions taken by all the key actors during the Conservative Party conference.
There has been something of a Whitehall “turf battle” over who controls Brexit policy
With multiple departments having a legitimate interest in Brexit strategy (Number 10, the Cabinet Office, the Treasury, the Foreign Office, the Departing for Exiting the European Union, Department for International Trade and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy), some sort of struggle over the “who?” element in the Brexit enterprise was all but unavoidable. There seem to have been two turf skirmishes in the course of the summer. The first was between the Department for Exiting the European Union and the Treasury over who called the shots in the economic aspects of the negotiations for departure. This was a battle destined to happen when it did because the Treasury sees itself as the biggest beast in the bureaucratic jungle (which it usually is) and it made sense to stake out its territory while the DEEU was still in the process of recruiting civil servants. The second contest was between the Department for International Trade and the Foreign Office over the future of UKTI which has been the child of both the Foreign Office and what was BIS. This dispute was more public because the alleged enmity between Liam Fox and Boris Johnson was leaked to and happily lapped up by the media which was otherwise desperately short of material in a slow August.
The interesting aspect of this activity is that in both cases Number 10, the institutional arbiter in all such fights, largely came down on the side of the new “upstart” departments against the far more firmly established Whitehall fiefdoms. The Treasury does not appear to have carved out economics as its own domain in the Brexit dialogue and the DIT seems to have seized UKTI from its old masters.
There seems to be a move in the “soft” versus “hard” Brexit debate in favour of the “hard” camp
There have been two different schools of thought on Brexit from the moment the result was known. One lobby wanted the UK to maintain as close a relationship to the institutions of the EU as possible while being outside of them predominantly to ensure maximum access to the single market. Another fraternity preferred a cleaner break from the EU in order to acquire the maximum possible freedom to manage migration flows differently. The balance of argument could easily change again but there is a sense about that the “hard” camp is making the running and the model adopted might be less that of “Norland” (an outcome between Norway and Switzerland) and more akin to “Switzada” (a settlement between that which Switzerland and Canada have in the EU). This trend appears to be occurring for three main reasons. First, the Prime Minister herself sees acquiring the means to set migration policy and then achieving that reduction in immigration as a political absolute. Second, the assessment of even very friendly EU states is that they are simply not going to concede unimpeded access to the single market and the capacity to limit, even modestly or symbolically, the unfettered movement of people to the UK in any exit agreement. Third, perhaps ironically, is that increased confidence in the capacity of the UK economy to withstand Brexit is weakening the “soft” faction.
There is, by contrast, more of a debate now about when to trigger Article 50 than back in July
The position of the Government before the summer recess was that while there was “no rush” to authorise Article 50, there was an expectation that the button would be pressed early in 2017. There is more of a debate today about exactly when to do that, with the case being made for January, April or even July. This is partly because different people hold different views about how much work has to be done in advance of the official negotiations. It is also because there is a notion that starting the dialogue before the identity of the post-2017 French President is clear is pointless. There is also a fierce legal debate about the extent to which Article 50 is something close to a “trap”. If Article 50 were to be held back, the price of delay may be that the Government makes a commitment to a date for departure from the EU at the same time. Plenty, then, to chat about over coffee at Chequers