Another day another cabinet minister's confusing Brexit vision

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/feb/20/another-day-another-cabinet-ministers-confusing-brexit-vision

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It seems there might be a plan after all. If you’re sufficiently confused yourself there’s no better way of communicating that confusion to your enemies than by sending out several members of the cabinet to relay your Brexit vision. And getting them to say something different every time. Just about the only living things close to No 10 not to be given the chance to make their case for Brexit are the Four Pot Plants. The only ones likely to come up with anything vaguely coherent.

Today it was David Davis’s turn in the limelight. Some 20 minutes later than planned, the Brexit secretary walked out into a Vienna broom cupboard to address a few rows of local businessmen, embassy and departmental officials, and a contingent of the British media. It’s fair to say there’s rather more interest in this series of speeches back in the UK than there is elsewhere in the EU. And that’s saying something.

Davis was determined to start in an upbeat fashion. British and European business was working so well that, even as he was speaking, his jointly made Swedish and British driverless lawnmower was running amok, deadheading the daffodil shoots in his back garden in Yorkshire before they had even flowered. That was the kind of future he wanted. One where lawnmowers were free to go wherever they chose without facing customs checks from the French beans.

Brexit wasn’t going to be some Mad Max dystopian future, he continued. Though it might be like something out of the Hunger Games if we couldn’t persuade EU workers to come over to Britain to pick our fruit and veg. Not for the first time, people began to wonder if Davis had actually read his speech before delivering it. Never mind that less than two years previously, he had insisted the Brexit negotiations would be the easiest in history and that the UK was heading for a land of milk and honey. Now all he was promising was that Britain wasn’t going to end up as a desert with gangs of marauding psychopathic petrol heads competing for supremacy. In driverless lawnmowers.

What we were going to get instead were gangs of psychopathic cabinet members competing for supremacy with radically different proposals. Just days earlier, Boris Johnson had argued for a deregulated EU future: one where Britain was in with a chance of winning any race to the bottom. Davis saw it differently. He wanted more regulation rather than less. A race to the top.

The whole reason Britain had voted to leave the EU was because it was essentially a lawless state. One whose countries had no regard for important issues of health and safety, environmental protection and workers’ rights. The reality of the EU was that it was a dog eat dog world. So Britain had had to take a stand. We had left the EU precisely because we cared so passionately. What the EU saw as just a load of red tape for a snowflake generation obsessed with polar bears and chlorinated chickens, Britain saw as fundamental principles of a civilised society.

But Davis hadn’t come to Vienna to bury the EU. Rather he had come to offer it an olive branch. Now was the EU’s moment to better itself. To forget its petty-minded, internecine squabbling and join Britain in creating a Brave New World. Together they might even be able to create a regulatory framework for the future. Who knows? They might even call it the single market and the customs union.

Having left everyone thoroughly confused as to whether Davis was as dim as he had made himself appear, the Brexit secretary took a few questions. First to confirm that the government wasn’t going to tear up the Good Friday agreement. Which was progress of sorts after some of the recent Brexit rhetoric, but still didn’t explain how it was going to resolve the Irish issue. Then to get distinctly tetchy when the Telegraph’s Kate McCann asked him if he was as lazy as some of his colleagues believe him to be.

After protesting a little too much, Davis ended with, “Right I think I’d better stop there because in my lazy schedule I have got to head off to Athens next.” Where he would presumably be giving the same lazy, ill-considered speech.