Matthew d'Ancona: The world awaits Brexit yet the Cabinet carries on squabbling

As the UN general assembly in New York frets over the prospect of war in the Pacific theatre, a nervous peace breaks out in the British Cabinet. Divided like North and South Korea, Theresa May and her colleagues have bickered for days over Britain’s departure from the EU and the melodramatic conduct of Boris Johnson, who still stalks the Brexit zone like a trigger-happy patrol guard.

Tomorrow, the Prime Minister will disclose to senior ministers the content of the speech she is due to give in Florence on Friday. It is a measure of how weak and introspective her Government has become that the question of Britain’s future place in Europe — and, to a great extent, the world — has been reduced to a party disciplinary matter.

In little more than 17 months, Britain will cease to be a member of the EU. Yet, provoked by the Foreign Secretary’s 4,000-word Telegraph essay on the subject, the various overlapping camps within the Cabinet have argued bitterly since the weekend over the respective virtues of the Canadian, Swiss and Norwegian models that the UK might emulate.

Their semi-public debates combine Jesuitical casuistry with the nervousness of a model asking: “Does my bum look big in this trade arrangement?” What is conspicuously lacking is the urgency and unity that one might have expected to be well-established by now, almost 15 months since the referendum.

At the centre of this woeful mayhem stands Johnson, who has once again claimed the limelight, if not the moral high ground. In contrast to his mentor, Michael Heseltine, who resigned over the Westland affair in 1986, the Foreign Secretary has performed an absurd hokey-cokey since his article appeared.

One moment, his “friends” signal that he is ready to quit if the PM suggests that she is ready to pay for access to the EU single market indefinitely (the so-called “Swiss” option). Next, he declares himself mystified by the whole rumpus, and claims that the Cabinet is a “nest of singing birds”.

Matthew d'Ancona

The charm of this familiar act — private manoeuvring, public loyalty — is wearing decidedly thin. Though you might not have guessed it from some of the coverage, more is at stake in this instance than the Foreign Secretary’s long-held ambition to move into Number 10.

As this infantilised Cabinet argues over whose turn it is to go on the seesaw, the rest of us await news on the Government’s plans for Britain’s future outside the EU. Absurdly, however, May’s priority when she speaks on Friday will be to reassert public control of her ramshackle government.

Though she may reveal more of her Brexit plans and their evolution, her principal political objective will be to affirm that they have not changed. Expect emphatic reference to the speech she delivered at Lancaster House in January, and her unwavering fidelity to its principles.

Yet — as Johnson’s behaviour has made embarrassingly clear — the political context has changed radically since she set out that blueprint. The snap election that was meant to make her politically invincible did precisely the opposite. Just as John Major was tormented by the Eurosceptics and Europhiles, May has been reduced to a mostly impotent observer of her colleagues’ often insufferable antics.

This is more than Westminster soap opera. It is having a material impact upon the most important negotiations undertaken by this country since the Second World War. What individual members of the Cabinet think about this or that aspect of Brexit is of negligible importance compared to the position of our 27 soon-to-be-ex partners in the EU.

In the first three rounds of talks, David Davis has represented Britain alone while his opposite number, Michel Barnier, has spoken for everyone else. When 27 foxes and one chicken vote to decide what’s for dinner, it’s not hard to guess who’s going in the pot.

The analogy is not precise, of course, as, in this case, the chicken has something to offer the salivating foxes — which is continued commercial partnership, decent treatment of EU nationals and collaboration in a range of areas such as defence, law and order and intelligence. This is not nothing. But the UK will make little progress unless and until its squabbling Cabinet factions accept that this negotiating process is not a level playing field and that their ideological objections to this or that detail are mostly irrelevant.

One of the most sensible interventions of the week was made by William Hague, a former Tory leader and Foreign Secretary who knows of what he speaks. Ministers, he argued, should be concentrating on practicality rather than indulging in pique. “Leaving is a really difficult and complicated process,” he wrote in the Telegraph, “which, speaking bluntly again, it would be quite easy to screw up.”

No less striking was his conclusion that Britain should aim for a straightforward interim period “when we stay in the single market and customs union and then have enough time to settle a good free trade deal.” Hague, who fought the 2001 general election promising to “keep the pound” and to prevent Britain becoming a “foreign land”, is scarcely a passionate Europhile. But he is an experienced statesman who knows that, whatever individual members of this particular Cabinet may think to the contrary, Britain’s exit from the EU comes with a price tag and that what British business craves most is a measure of certainty and as smooth a transition as possible.

It is unlikely that the PM will offer such a sensibly uncluttered plan on Friday. Her primary task, in any case, will be to remind her colleagues and the world that she is in charge, and not just in office. Whatever she says in Florence, nothing can alter the fact that this week the Tories behaved like a party fit only for opposition.