Theresa May is ‘afraid of her own shadow’, her government is weak and Brexit is proving ‘nonsense’, observers say

Theresa May has less than a week to salvage a Brexit deal that would open the way to trade talks before the end of the year, amid increasing signs of impatience within the EU over her handling of the process.

EU negotiators expect the prime minister to return to Brussels very soon, but have said time is running out to strike a deal at a European summit next week.



“The show is now in London,” said the chief spokesman of the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker. “We stand ready here in the commission to resume talks with the United Kingdom at any moment in time when we get the sign that London is ready.”

While the next “final” deadline for stage one has not been defined publicly, several EU sources said the deal would have to be struck by the end of the week, with either Friday or Sunday as the last resort.

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One EU ambassador told the Guardian the failure to reach a deal on Northern Ireland was a microcosm of a wider problem. “At root the problem is that [May] seems incapable of making a decision and is afraid of her own shadow,” the source said.



“We cannot go on like this, with no idea what the UK wants. She just has to have the conversation with her own cabinet, and if that upsets someone, or someone resigns, so be it. She has to say what kind of trading relationship she is seeking. We cannot do it for her, and she cannot defer forever.”

For weeks, European officials have walked a tightrope between sticking to the EU’s tough negotiating stance and seeking to avoid action or words that could destabilise the fragile May government.

“We have to treat the UK political system like a rotten egg,” said one EU source in the run-up to Monday’s talks, suggesting that if “the realities of the world” dawned too soon, the British government could become more fragile.



One MEP said the government’s weakness was “a key question” for the EU. “We are also in a very difficult position because it would not be in our interests to see the whole thing fall apart,” said Petri Sarvamaa, a Finnish centre-right MEP who is a vice-chair of the European parliament’s budgets committee. “At the same time … it’s not our duty to help the British government in a negotiation that is between them and us.



“The bottom line is that the May government is facing an impossible task,” said Sarvamaa, adding that promises made to British voters during the referendum campaign and before June’s snap election could not be kept. The government was in “an ever-worsening, deteriorating cycle,” he said. “I love Britain and I hate to see what is going on.

“They have to solve this thing 100% by themselves but unfortunately it looks impossible. We really don’t want to the negotiations to fall down, we don’t want the British government to fall apart, but what can we do?”

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For some EU sources, the dominant mood is resignation. “The government is weak and, yes, that has created problems in many respects,” another source said. “The EU27 is conscious of these problems and is trying to help. But at the end of the day we only have one interlocutor.”

EU officials are stretching their own procedures – the early preparation of summit documents – because the Irish border issue is seen as a vital question of peace, which is in a different league to the Brexit bill. Officials thought they were inches away from agreeing on Monday a text that would have paved the way for the UK to move to trade talks.

While Monday’s imbroglio was relegated mostly to the inside pages of many continental newspapers, the tone was often critical. “Theresa May taken hostage at the Irish border,” was the headline in France’s leftwing standard, Libération, which described Monday’s events as a circus.

Perhaps the most scathing verdict was that of the Deutschlandfunk commentator Peter Kapern, who described Brexit as “the biggest political nonsense” since the Roman emperor Caligula made his favourite horse a senator. “Anyone who needed further proof of this thesis has received it today,” he wrote.

Even if an agreement on Brexit was reached in the coming days, Kapern said, Monday’s events showed “that the United Kingdom will not only leave the EU but, above all, the world stage”.