Theresa’s awful week

UK Prime Minister juggling too many balls at the same time

Now that the World Cup is over for England, the people will go back to focus on the other big ongoing match: the Brexit negotiation.

The quitting of foreign minister Boris Johnson and of chief Brexit negotiator David Davis has put Westminster in a precarious situation. Now Prime Minister Theresa May will have to conduct the double negotiation with his government and with the EU with two more hawks watching over her every step and advocating for a possibly unrealistic harder Brexit that she would like to have.

With this move, she will now have to crank-up her hard-Brexit side, especially in view of the Monday vote on her White Paper on the negotiations, which hard-liner of her own party like Jacob Rees-Moog are already threatening to vote down. If that were to happen, it would be the equivalent of losing a confidence vote and could potentially spell new elections or a new leadership, which would further erode the already little time left till the official date set for the Exit from the union, March 2019.

This is the situation internally, but on the other side of The Channel the EU is not prone to make any compromise either, seeing the latest sovereigntist winds sweeping the continent which has the double effect of tightening the ranks of both sides. If the institutions are perceived to be weak, malleable and prone to making concessions, then all the other member states would want a piece of the cake too, which would translate in a disastrous domino effect on top of the already eroding trust the citizens put in the EU. So, on the continent May won’t find any doves either.

To add the cherry on top of this cake and to conclude Theresa’s awful week, the biggest hawk of all has just landed in London and it’s already creating more than one head-scratch to the government. I’m talking of course of Donald Trump that, as soon as he landed on UK soil has stated that “his good friend” Theresa hasn’t listened to him on Brexit and went in the opposite direction, that her plan to exit the EU will probably compromise any chance of getting a good trade deal with the US, insinuating that in talking with the UK, the American government would really just be dealing with the European Union instead and then concluded this already compromising stance by praising Boris Johnson which in Donald’s mind “would be a very good Prime Minister”.

With these new developments, the government is officially in the middle of nowhere and the strategy to trying to please everybody has had the effect of pleasing nobody instead. The hard-liners of Brexit want to ditch the Byzantine EU in order to embrace the “special relationship” with the USA and “soft-brexiters” don’t really have much of a leg to stand on at the moment.

The UK tried to wiggle its way into a bridge position between the two sides of the Atlantic, but this is probably the worst time to do so as it seems the gap between the two continents is increasing and they only have enough bricks to reach one of the shores. Will the government still pursue this middle way strategy or will it choose a side? Whatever it is, the clock is ticking fast and the great World Cup interlude is over. It’s coming home, the attention is coming home.