Booker: the Ridge line

15/01/2017

Sunday week last feels a long, long time ago, making the debut Sophy Ridge show a thing of the distant past. Oddly enough, according to a puff in the Guardian, her aim was "to show how politics affects those outside the Westminster bubble". In that, at least, she failed.

Instead, the facile woman went for the easy shot, trying to get Mrs May to admit that we would "leave the single market". And when the Prime Minister contradicted her and said wanted us to remain "within" the Single Market, Ridge took this as confirmation of our leaving, triggering a further costly slump in the value of the pound.

But, says Booker, in his latest column, had Ms Ridge been more on the ball, she would have pounced Mrs May's words and asked how, outside the EU, such a thing as remaining "within" the Single Market was possible.

She could have pointed out (as Booker has been doing consistently) that there is only one conceivable way in which, on leaving the EU, we could still do this. That is by rejoining the European Free Trade Area (Efta) to remain, like rich Norway, in the European Economic Area.

Says Booker, there are no ifs or buts here. Despite the efforts of so many to deny it, this is the only solution that ticks all the boxes of what most people say they want from Brexit. While freeing us from three quarters of the EU's laws, we could continue participating in the single market as we do now, thus avoiding a catastrophic disruption to our trade.

We would, he says, no longer be subject to the European Court of Justice. We could regain selective control over immigration from the EU. We could negotiate independent trade deals with the rest of the world. And we would buy ourselves time to discuss all those 30 other major policy areas needing to be resolved in the mere two years allowed for negotiations.

Ms Ridge may have got her headlines. But if only she'd been clever enough to ask the right question, she might just have prodded Mrs May into saying something more meaningful than all those vacuous headlines suggested. Now we must await Mrs May's promised speech this week to see whether we get more substantial clues than anything achieved by that silly interview.

Already, though, the mice are nibbling at the corn, with the Sun on Sunday claiming that Mrs May is expected to announce the UK "is prepared to leave the single market, the customs union and European Court of Justice".

Relying on "senior sources", the paper is able to divine that Mrs May will unveil her "secret masterplan" (should it be mistressplan?) for a "swift and clean" Brexit, and declare: "We're on our way out". Thus are we to get a "triple whammy departure from the EU to be triggered within 75 days": out of the single market, out of the customs union and out of the control of European judges.

The other Murdoch title, the Sunday Times, says much the same but at greater length. It is also declaring that Mrs May will announce that Britain is seeking a "clean and hard" Brexit, pulling out the Single Market and the customs union in order to regain control of immigration and end the jurisdiction of the ECJ.

This is the bog-standard media trope which has not changed in months since promotion to the collective "line to take", now having become "the Ridge line", to coin a phrase. However, in the ST story, David Davis adds to this, telling us that a "transitional deal" is on the cards. According to him, if necessary, the government will "consider time for implementation of new arrangements".

No more than speculation at this stage, this is embellished by the Sunday Telegraph which decides that Theresa May is "to side with Eurosceptics in major Brexit speech revealing what she wants from negotiations". Once again the trope emerges unscathed, with May supposedly seeking to appease the Eurosceptic wing of her party. The same phrasing emerges, as she contemplates a "hard", or "clean" Brexit.

But, in the Telegraph's case, their front-page lead is all based on the most tenuous of threads – not even on sources inside government. We now have to depend on "sources familiar with the prime minister's thinking". Whatever that might mean, it marks a new low in this journal's diminishing claim to be a purveyor of news.

Written before it got its hands on the Telegraph story and copied it out, the Guardian website was recording this "intelligence" as a "growing expectation". So, effectively, we're not being told the news, but simply what the media pack thinks might be the news on the day.

For all the speculation, the only thing substantive the media have to go on is an excerpt of the speech, described as "light on specifics". This has Mrs May calling for an end to the division and the language associated with it – "leaver" and "remainer" and all the accompanying insults. We must all "unite to make a success of Brexit and build a truly Global Britain" - as if.

Meanwhile one former "remainer", Nick Clegg, is calling for Mrs May to go for a "Norway-style trade deal", even if he seems somewhat confused about what is involved. He lauds Efta for allowing its members "the potential to suspend rules on free movement if a case can be made for doing so". In his whole article, the EEA is not mentioned.

This Sunday, therefore, the entire politico-media nexus is living up to its unenvied reputation for ignorance and ill-informed speculation. They make it up as they go along to compensate for the lack of facts, copying off each other in a frenzy of coprophagia, as they all feed off the same inventions.

Building of the torrent of speculation, the Independent builds the next stage of the fabrication. It pitches in inviting reactions from politicians to the event that has not yet happened. Thus it has Tim Farron tell us: "This speech proves that Theresa May is driving the country towards a divisive and destructive exit from the European Union".

"If the UK had voted 52-48 to remain you can bet that Theresa May would never be pushing towards a hard Remain. There would be no embracing of the Euro, no joining the Schengen Zone", he says. "But the Prime Minister seems hell bent on ripping up everything we share with the European Union no matter how damaging that is to the UK".

We also get Anna Soubry saying: "The Government has no mandate for this. To go into the negotiation conceding on the single market and the customs union is extremely serious and very bad news".

Following the example of the Independent, the Mail on Sunday adopts a similar stratagem, using Nicky Morgan to respond to an as-yet-undelivered speech. She believes that leaving the single market "would exact a disproportionate economic toll on UK businesses due to lost trade opportunities".

With all that, there is obviously no need now for the Prime Minister to give her speech. The media and the politicians have already decided what's in it and, in the style of Sophy Ridge, even if she says something completely different, they can ignore it and tell us what she "really" said.

On the other hand, we might just wait until Tuesday to see what she actually says. Even if we are not pleasantly surprised, at least we will be better informed.