What is a ‘red, white and blue Brexit’?

This is no Christmas cracker joke – like newspapers that are “black and white, and read all over” – but the deadly serious riddle posed by Theresa May on Tuesday when asked for an update on Britain’s EU exit strategy.

Others have attempted to paint Downing Street’s limited options in terms of binary colours: a hard, “black”, uncompromising Brexit versus a softer, “grey” version that seeks to preserve free market access in exchange for limited concessions rather than the full white flag of surrender. But the prime minister now sounds more like her foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, in suggesting there is room to have cake and eat it under the bunting at her street party.

“I’m interested in all these terms that have been identified – hard Brexit, soft Brexit, black Brexit, white Brexit, grey Brexit – and actually what we should be looking for is a red, white and blue Brexit,” she told reporters on a trip to Bahrain.

Translated from Whitehall mandarin, it appears May is suggesting something rather jolly, patriotic, and bespoke: a Brexit carefully crafted to suit British needs rather than procured off the shelf from a grim-faced foreign bureaucrat, a Brexit you can run up a flag pole and let flutter proudly.

Will it fly in Brussels?

The trouble is that translating this into other European languages is even tougher than translating it into English. On Tuesday, the chief EU negotiator, Michel Barnier, said even he was confused over what the difference was between hard and soft Brexit, since other member states regarded membership as an indivisible concept.

“I can [only] say what Brexit is,” he said earlier in Brussels. “We want a clear agreement, we want to reach this agreement in the limited time we have available and we want it to take account of our point of view, the interests of the 27 as defined by the European council, and [be] something that preserves the unity of the 27.”

More translation difficulties arise from a British habit of not taking such pronouncements at face value and assuming they must be starting points for some elaborate verbal dance to come. “The trouble with all the eagle-eyed Mayology is its anglocentric premise: that the British side of the negotiations is the decisive variable,” wrote the Financial Times commentator Janan Ganesh this week. “If only we could switch off our Wildean irony radar and accept words at face value.”

What is May playing at?

Until recently, a little creative wordplay was all that Downing Street had to offer. Except, now it finally has bowed to pressure to reveal its actual negotiating strategy before taking the country down the irreversible path to Brexit.

With a clever twist to ensure parliament at least supports the direction of travel, the government has agreed to support a Labour amendment to publish a plan before triggering article 50.

It will force May to drop her claim that she was keeping her cards close to her chest to avoid tipping off rival negotiators, but risks revealing that Britain is actually holding a busted flush – more red, white and blue than all red.

In this context, the colourful talk of a bunting-draped Brexit with endless rounds of cake seems to be little more than morale boosting before the big reveal, before we find out whether May is hiding more than crumbs under her patriotic tea towel.



