21/10/2016
In anticipation of Mrs May's first European Council as Prime Minister, I had cleared the decks, preparing to write a full analysis of the events, trawling the depths for deeper meanings.
In the event, there is nothing very much to report. If Mrs May is in deep, meaningful discussions with the "colleagues", then she's keeping it very much to herself. And neither are her putative confidants leaking very much.
All we had to
entertain the media was a pre-Council comment by soon-to-be ex-president of France, François Hollande, who warned that the [Article 50] negotiations would be "hard" if the British Prime Minister persisted in moving towards a "hard" Brexit.
This, we can take as yet another indication of a certain looseness in the definition (not) of a "hard Brexit". The original concept as defined by the "lunatic fringe" had the UK walking away from the EU, repealing the ECA and relying on WTO agreements as the basis for trade with the EU.
As with much else, we have diverse players in the game, using the same vocabulary but meaning different â and sometimes polar opposite â things. Progress is going to be very hard won if people are talking past each other in this way.
Nor does it help having the Parliamentary zombies repeating their mantras, as with Shipley MP Philip Davies yesterday, at
Brexit questions.
In common with much of the Tory Right, he regards membership of the Single Market as having to accept EU laws, having to accept rulings from the European Court of Justice, probably still making contributions to the EU budget, and accepting free movement of people.
All of this, he says, flies in the face of what the British people voted for in the referendum. This, in the minuscule mind of Mr Davies, the only question of principle that is at stake is "the question of whether the EU wants to continue its tariff-free trade with the UK or if it wants to commit economic suicide?"
When you have MPs who's sole context for Brexit is "tariff-free trade", there is no hope for them â no possibility of salvation. They are simply not in the game â just noise-makers who fill time and space in what would otherwise be a media vacuum.
And that is also the problem with European Councils. Attended by hundreds of hacks, with very little to occupy their time in between sessions, the pack spends its time chewing over the tiny number of "nuggets" it thrown, desperate to dredge a story out of what is often very little or nothing at all.
The combined presence represents a huge investment by the legacy media, which will insist on a story, come what may â with the result that newspapers throughout Europe are carrying much the same headlines, the collective telling us nothing very much that we didn't know already.
Largely,
the emphasis is on the attempts by Mrs May to reassure EU leaders. The UK will be a "strong dependable partner" after Brexit,
ITN has her saying. Nevertheless,
die Welt tells us: "
Theresa May ist für Brüssel das groÃe Rätsel" (Theresa May is the great riddle for Brussels), which is something we're all going to have to live with.
For my part, I've been spending my time doing something useful â working on a new Monograph, this one on the Single Market. Things you think you know take on a whole new perspective when you start researching them in depth, and there are facets of the market which emerge which are very troublesome indeed. The stalled
Product Safety and Market Surveillance Package is a case in point.
With or without the Single Market, the UK is potentially in for a very tough time, but even more so if it makes the mistake of standing aside from formal participation and tries to go it alone. Small wonder that the newly elected "chair" of the Brexit Select Committee, Hilary Benn, is
calling for transitional arrangements for the financial services sector after Brexit. He is
not alone.
Meanwhile, the House of Lords European Union Committee has
published a report on parliamentary scrutiny of Brexit, arguing for greater scrutiny of the forthcoming Brexit negotiations. Not a word is said, of course, about the competence of those scrutinisers, but one would seriously question the Committee's assertion that Parliament can "make a significant contribution to the development of the Government's thinking".
So far, the noise-to-intelligence ratio is so high that the few nuggets of wisdom which may emerge are being drowned out by the torrent of dross. It is hardly worth the effort these days, of trying to sieve through it all, in the hope of finding anything of value.
At least, that leaves more time to do some useful work, even if it leaves the noise-makers to dominate the field for the time being. But as reality strikes, the "riddle of May" could emerge with something worth listening to. As it stands, that is our best and nearly only hope.
