ON FRIDAY Theresa May announced that her cabinet had at last united around a plan to take Britain out of the European Union. The unity lasted barely 48 hours. Late on Sunday night David Davis, the Brexit secretary, resigned from the cabinet, saying that the prime minister’s new strategy would leave Britain in “at best a weak negotiating position, and possibly an inescapable one”. Steve Baker, a junior Brexit minister, announced his departure shortly afterwards. This morning Westminster is abuzz with speculation about who might follow.

Mrs May had pushed her plan for a softened Brexit through an all-day meeting of her cabinet at Chequers, her official country residence. After the meeting she said the days of ministerial dissent on Brexit were over. From now on, she would enforce collective cabinet responsibility, implying that any minister who objected publicly to her proposals would have to resign.

It is not hard to see why hardline Brexiteers like Mr Davis are disappointed by the plan. Under Mrs May’s proposal, Britain would be in a common regulatory area with the EU for all goods, including agrifoods, and would also promise to observe all future EU rules. This implies effective membership of the single market for goods. The figleaf that Parliament will have the right not to adopt EU legislation is just that; in practice, because it would mean losing unrestricted access to the single market, it would be a nuclear weapon that cannot be used.

Services would not be in the single market, however. Mrs May hopes instead to secure open trade with the EU through some system of mutual recognition, while keeping the right to vary rules to suit trade with third countries. But to satisfy Brussels, she also promises not to undercut the EU through lower standards for the environment, social and employment policies or rules against state aid. A dispute-resolution mechanism implicitly accepts a role for the European Court of Justice.



On customs, Mrs May suggests a “facilitated customs partnership” under which Britain would collect EU tariffs on imports but refund them for any that stay in Britain. But this untested scheme will not be ready for some years. In the meantime Britain will, in effect, stay in a customs union with the EU. The combination of single-market membership for goods with a customs union will preserve frictionless trade with the EU and satisfy Mrs May’s undertaking to avert a hard border in Ireland.



Hard Brexiteers are appalled. The customs and goods proposals would make it all but impossible to strike ambitious trade deals with third countries. The chances of a trade deal with America would be tiny, despite Donald Trump’s apparent enthusiasm for one; Mrs May’s plan precludes the acceptance of American agrifoods, a priority for negotiators there. And the exclusion of services, which make up 80% of the economy and in which, unlike goods, Britain has a large trade surplus, seems better for the EU than for the United Kingdom.

Yet Brexiteers have long known that Mrs May and her advisers were moving towards a softer Brexit. Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, reportedly likened her proposals at Chequers to “polishing a turd”. Several Tory backbenchers were similarly critical. But the truth is that the hard Brexiteers, although freely critical of Mrs May, have not offered any other way to satisfy the demands of British business to keep frictionless trade and to prevent a hard border in Ireland.

Hardliners have long talked of staging a leadership challenge to Mrs May, which requires the nod from just 48 Tory MPs. Following Mr Davis’s departure, plotting has resumed in earnest. Yet they might struggle to win such a contest. Michael Gove, the pro-Brexit environment secretary, conceded on July 8th that the parliamentary arithmetic since the June 2017 election had made a softer Brexit inevitable. He now places his hopes on the notion that, after Brexit has happened next March, its terms can subsequently be changed.

That will be difficult. Mrs May intends to enshrine her proposals in a treaty. Even so, there is a clearer route to a harder Brexit: that the EU rejects her plan out of hand. European leaders have made clear that they cannot accept cherry-picking in which Britain takes the benefits it wants from the single market without accepting all its obligations. But since Mrs May’s white paper will be the first full proposal that Britain has made since the June 2016 referendum, EU leaders are likely to agree to study it carefully and then be ready to negotiate over its details.

This is where problems may arise. Mrs May thinks her softening of Brexit is as far as she can go politically. But EU leaders will want a lot more, including continuing payments into the EU budget. Trickiest of all, they are likely to demand an acceptance of the principle of free movement of EU citizens, which they see as one of the four indivisible freedoms of the single market. Mrs May was firm this week that free movement will end, though she is offering a “mobility framework” in its place. Unless this is sufficiently generous, however, the EU will still probably say no.

Some Brexiteers hope that, in that event, they can resurrect the idea of walking out with no deal at all. In a sop to them, the cabinet has agreed to step up preparations for such an outcome. But in practice, it is too late. A no-deal Brexit next March would have catastrophic consequences for the economy. Some form of Mrs May’s softer Brexit is likely to prevail. Brexiteers have only themselves to blame. In over two years since they won the referendum, they have failed to come up with a convincing and workable alternative.