James Forsyth James Forsyth

Does May even have a Plan B?

Cabinets these days are fractious affairs. Ministers take increasingly unsubtle digs at each other as they rehearse the same old arguments. But this week, Theresa May chose to have a pop at someone who wasn’t there. ‘We’re still suffering from George,’ she told her colleagues — a reference to the former chancellor George Osborne. Her complaint was that Osborne’s over-the-top threats of a punishment Budget and other such claims during the 2016 referendum campaign had made it far harder to get Tory MPs and the public to take warnings of the consequences of no deal seriously. For her, this is a big problem. Her Brexit deal will only get through because of fear of the supposed alternatives: no deal or a second referendum.

May does have a point about what this magazine was first to call Project Fear. The warnings, then, were overdone: instead of 500,000 fewer jobs after the referendum there were 700,000 more jobs. But now, when the government points to genuine cause for alarm about the consequences of a no-deal Brexit, its warnings are dismissed. It cried wolf last time and is ignored now.

At the same time, May must take her share of the blame for regularly intoning that ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’ while failing to do the contingency planning necessary to enable the country to manage the disruption of no deal. It is, for example, a remarkable demonstration of incompetence that it is only now — with fewer than 100 days to go to Brexit — that the government is doing anything to try to build up alternatives to the Dover/Calais routes.

The government’s great New Year hope was that MPs would return from the Christmas break in a more pragmatic frame of mind, more likely to accept its deal.

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