Chequers dead. May fights back. Proper reset required

Well that went well. The Prime Minister travelled to Salzburg for the EU summit this week with hopes high in her Number 10 team that EU leaders would signal a breakthrough on Brexit. Instead, they killed her compromise plan and humiliated her in the aftermath.

It was a political horror show, the diplomatic equivalent of that moment last year when the letters fell off the slogan behind May as she had a coughing fit during her party conference speech. Salzburg was that bad.

Twenty four hours after the humiliation, after a morning spent picking up the pieces with her advisers, May made a powerful, dignified and direct appeal to the nation in a live broadcast. She defended the integrity of the Union and the UK. Good for her. Although the rhetoric was strong, the substance – she’s sticking with Chequers – can only be a holding position considering the practical realities. Too much has changed this week.

Incidentally, before we get stuck in can I apologise to Reaction subscribers in North America and elsewhere who put up with an awful lot of Brexit stuff on here? I suppose the consolation is that as a third series of Fawlty Towers will never be made, the shambolic conduct of the Brexit negotiations is the next best thing.

But watching this latest double episode special from Salzburg unfold you didn’t have to be a May fan (I spent a year writing that she had to go and saying that Britain needed a functioning Prime Minister) to feel intense sympathy for her in simple human terms. Donald Tusk, the EU Council President and supposedly one of the decent ones, used his Instagram account to mock May, offering her a cake but with “no cherries”. What a nice guy.

That jumped up Napoleon in a Hugo Boss suit – President Macron, who is increasingly unpopular in France – called Brexiteers liars. It’s also fashionable this talk of liars among fanatical ultra-Remainers in the UK taking the EU’s side. They hate Brexiteers, fine. But they never seem to pause to reflect on why the UK chose to leave – voters having been clear all along since Masstricht in the early 1990s that they did not want the EU integrationist model. Leaving was always going to happen eventually.

The best you can say if you are a Remainer who disagrees that Brexit was always going to happen is that former Prime Minister David Cameron should never have put it to the vote in 2016, and otherwise, none of this would have happened. Confusingly, those people who objected to the vote now want a second referendum, but strangely not a third, fourth or fifth.

As though Britain can just go back to 2015. Stopping Brexit would not necessarily stimulate the outrage on a vast scale that diehard Brexiteers predict. Yet it would, it seems clear, lead to the creation of a supercharged populist replacement for UKIP probably capable of getting 25% to 30% of the vote and upending the Conservative and possibly Labour parties in the process.

Back in Salzburg, Chancellor Merkel was useless as usual – failing as ever to use Germany’s heft to engineer an imaginative solution or compromise. To be fair, Merkel is assailed by a crisis a week at home right now. But isn’t that what great leaders are supposed to be able to do? To transcend difficulties and by force of personality change the weather and get deals done.

No such European leader is available, it seems, meaning an EU more worried by its epic migration problems swatted May away in a fashion that should – if we have any national pride – result in a “who the hell do they think they are dealing with?” backlash.

Right now comes a weekend of Tory plotting, with the various factions in the cabinet communicating and trying to work out what to suggest and demand ahead of cabinet next week.

Those ministers saying that May would be mad to pretend “nothing has changed” are right.

For this debacle represents a humiliating defeat for British policy, for the ministers who backed it, for the senior civil servants who designed it, and for those of us – raises hand – who argued that it was at least worth a shot to unlock deadlocked talks.

The official line is that these are negotiations and that it will all come good in the end in the early hours of the morning in November. Perhaps it will yet, but such is the tradition of European history producing disasters by accident that it is better to assume not and to prepare an alternative approach.

That means despite what May said today she will have to reset the negotiations and soon, pushing for a Canada-style free trade deal following transition. A Norway compromise – in the EEA and Efta – doesn’t seem to have the votes. No deal contingency planning needs to be improved – now.

There are other repercussions to consider. The Irish government was persuaded to go along with this trashing of Britain by the EU.  Perhaps as a consequence, Irish deputy PM Simon Coveney looked a lot less cocky than usual last night on Newsnight. He’s no fool and wore the worried look of a man doubtful it had been a good idea to put his country’s economy up as security for the arrogant Macron to humiliate the Brits, Ireland’s close neighbour, friend and trading partner. The current Irish government miscalculated in demanding a backstop dividing up the UK and is now caught in the middle of a terrible fight between France, the Commission and Germany on the one hand and the UK on the other.

In Whitehall, if the lead official on Brexit Olly Robbins harboured hopes of further advancement to the post of top mandarin cabinet secretary – he did not, say friends – those plans are in ruins now. Come the public inquiry there will be much interest in how and why the PM allowed the civil service machine to take control and make the mistakes that led to Salzburg. May made the calls, but she did so on the basis of a civil service plan.

Dominic Raab, the Brexit Secretary, is in an exceptionally powerful position to direct policy now. May lost his predecessor David Davis by backing Robbins. She cannot lose another Brexit Secretary and survive.

The Prime Minister herself will have to spend the weekend preparing to do what she is always least comfortable doing – that is working out a way to publicly change her mind. She has advantages. Almost all her party apart from a few People’s Vote loonies would rally. Labour’s plan (what is it?) is also a bespoke combo of the type the EU killed off at Chequers. That means Labour’s plan is dead too. Does Labour want Canada, Norway or No Deal? Time to choose. At least secret Brexiteer Jeremy Corbyn sticks to his mantra that Brexit must happen in some form.

If May does switch to negotiating for a Canada+ deal, and unveil a compromise plan on checks to deal with the Irish border, she can see it through if her health holds. Goodness, the pressure she is under.

Stick to “nothing has changed” and her party will have her out within weeks. A lot has changed.