Over at Politico Europe is a fun piece resting on some serious points. The article has the title “Brussels fears Britain’s ‘Brexit chaos’ part of cunning plan”. It begins:

“Viewed from Brussels, the UK seemed so ill-prepared in the early rounds of Brexit negotiations that some EU countries think it must be a trap”.

There is a long tradition of making out that there is method in madness, or at least method in daftness. The wonderful internet site TV Tropes has two categories on the representations of such approaches with examples from literature to video games: Obfuscating Stupidity and Obfuscating Insanity. From Hamlet to Blackadder there are many examples of claims that something silly or mad is really quite sophisticated. Whatever the verb “to lull” means, it is often done so as to create a false sense of security.

Applying this to the UK’s approach to the Brexit negotiations requires a fundamental distinction to be made. On the one hand there is the capability of UK officials, and on the other is direction (and lack of direction) and capacity (and lack of capacity).

On the former, the article is right to emphasise the high standard of British civil servants. The quotes “the British are always so organized” and “A non-prepared British government official simply doesn’t exist” are fair and true. That is why Sir Ivan Roger‘s resignation in January was significant: here was a great example of civil service competence warning something was not going well.

Whatever the cause of apparent UK disarray, it is not the quality of the officials. Civil servants and government lawyers have been routinely saving ministers’ proverbials since the Northcote–Trevelyan reforms, if not before. (Disclosure, I was a government lawyer at the Treasury Solicitor and the Treasury, 2003-5. I have never known a better group of lawyers in one place.)

But the capability of civil servants can only go so far. The Brexit chaos is because there is no political direction. Ministers do not know what they want to achieve and so do not know how to do so. Instead, Britain adopted a sequence of pathetic negotiating stances, many of which were usefully listed by an anonymous commenter to this blog last month (the comments on this blog are often better than the blogpost):

“Here’s a list of negotiating ploys that the UK has toyed with since the referendum, all of which have failed, either in the sense that they have been discarded or that they have failed to move either Brussels or the 27 other EU member states:

·that feelers or even negotiations could begin prior to Article 50 notification

·that feelers or even negotiations could be opened with individual EU member states, so bypassing or weakening Brussels

·that the UK could divide individual member states to its advantage

·that the UK could cherry pick benefits (floated by Johnson, specifically dismissed with respect to the single market in Mrs May’s Article 50 letter)

·that the UK could brandish effectively a threat to diminish or even to cease security cooperation

·that the UK would owe nothing once it left the EU

·that the UK would be content to crash out of the EU without any agreement whatsoever

·that discussions on the ‘divorce proceedings’ (the Irish land border, post-Brexit citizens’ rights and the divorce bill) could be conducted in parallel with discussions on the future trade relationship

·that the ECJ’s role would, for the UK, cease from 29 March 2019.

to which one might add:

·that the EU would be moved by the ‘strong and stable government’ that was to emerge from the June 2017 election.”

This is not even a complete list. There was the attempt to deploy the Duchess of Cambridge on a new royal yacht, an implicit threat of military action over Gibraltar, and the suggestion of making the UK a new low-tax no-regulation Singapore.

In the light of all these failed or discarded ploys, the latest idea that the UK has been cunning all the time is less of an explanation of such tactics than just another addition to the list.

What gives weight to the assertion that the UK government has no idea what it is doing, at ministerial level, is that Prime Minister Theresa May has form. When at the Home Office she launched the child sexual abuse inquiry: uncertain and impractical objectives, bad appointments, playing to the media and headline-grabbing assertions. Sound familiar?

The CSA inquiry has still got nowhere, and the design and implementation flaws are the same that Mrs May and her team brought to Brexit. It is no surprise that Mrs May is botching Brexit: to anyone who followed her at the Home Office, it would have been a surprise had she not done so. This was a Home Secretary who sincerely believed a case had been determined on the basis that a relevant party owned a pet cat.

And so there has been unforced error and unforced error: from the disorganisation caused by starting two pop-up government departments from scratch, to the needless red-line of the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice (with many unforeseen consequences), to calling a general election (in which her party lost its overall majority while trying to increase it) after making the Article 50 notification (and so losing three months of the two-year timetable). And the appointments of Boris Johnson and Liam Fox a year ago were never mischievous attempts to pin blame on Brexiters but merely misconceived.

Not long ago, this blog asked in jest whether a government determined to undermine the Brexit process would do anything very different from what this government is doing. Now senior European politicians are asking if the disarray is also part of some Machiavellian scheme. If that were true, it would be worrying. But the truth is more worrying: the government looks as if it is in disarray because it is in disarray.

Yet the EU team in the Brexit negotiations do need to stay on their guard — not because the UK is pretending to be in disarray, but because the disarray may not last forever. It cannot be taken for granted that the UK will make a hash of Brexit. As well as producing Theresa May and Boris Johnson, the country produced Lord Cockfield (who devised and skilfully implemented the single market).

At some point in a crisis, one hopes at least, there will be somebody — William Slim-like — to come along and get a grip. One should never assume that Britain will always be led by donkeys. The question is whether any change can come in time.

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