Theresa’s choice

The Brexit ‘inner cabinet’ met on Monday. It was meant to be an important meeting, one which made some real progress on deciding what kind of economic relationship with the EU the UK is seeking. Senior civil servants had been told that the crucial topic of the Irish border would be on the agenda. This is one of the hardest parts of the Brexit equation to solve, and the answer will reveal plenty about the kind of trade deal the UK is seeking and the trade-offs it is prepared to make.

But when the agenda for the meeting was circulated on Friday night, Ireland was not there. This left only data and security — the two least controversial of the nine questions that the Brexit cabinet is meant to address. As one member remarked to me afterwards: ‘We didn’t do the contentious stuff today.’

This fits a pattern. Theresa May has become so frightened of putting a foot wrong that she’s now extremely reluctant to confront any controversial issue. This is an exceedingly dangerous position for a Prime Minister. You can’t lead if you can’t make decisions. Her timidity has been exacerbated by the election. Her unusually bold call to go to the country four years early blew up in her face and as a result, she is more cautious than ever — at exactly the time when her country needs her to be most decisive.

Since the debacle of the lost majority, Conservatives have mostly refrained from complaining. Mrs May was needed to keep the party together and her departure would have triggered a fratricidal civil war; she had to stay in place to get over the first hurdle of the Brexit talks. But Tory patience is running out. One member of the Brexit inner cabinet has taken to warning people that the govern-ment’s Brexit policy-making ‘looks worse from the inside than the outside’.

The Prime Minister is either unwilling or unable to tackle the single biggest question facing the country: what will the ‘end-state’ relationship with the EU look like? We have barely more detail now than when she delivered her Lancaster House speech more than a year ago.