Brexit and Gardeners' Question Time

Mrs May and her new European friends

We’re at a phase in the Brexit talks where EU leaders have realised that further rebuffs of Theresa May would be very like repeatedly kicking a doleful puppy. Any more kicks and the puppy is likely to expire and the Conservative party would only go and replace it with something far worse. Still, being patronised at the recent meeting because she’s so weak and the Tory party is so hopeless made a nice change from the time before when no one wanted to talk to her, apart from four potted plants. This is what constitutes progress for the UK in the Brexit negotiations and could herald a whole new chapter in Britain’s brave buccaneering Brexit. We’re going to make fantastic trade deals with the rest of the world by making everyone feel sorry for Mother Theresa and us. Let's be honest, the only reason Mother Theresa retains a veneer of authority is because the party wants her to grasp the thorn of Brexit so she’s the one that’s poisoned by it.

Frau Merkel warned recently that the next stage of the Brexit talks, the trade negotiations, are going to be a lot more difficult than the divorce talks. Since the supposedly easier part of the negotiations hasn’t exactly moved forward with anything you might call speed, this doesn’t really bode well for the second stage: if and when, of course, the EU ever agrees to move on to it. The pot plants which Theresa May stares forelornly at begin to appear to have more agility than the Brexit negotiations. The plants may get fed a diet of crap but they still manage to look attractive. No amount of crap that Theresa feeds the British public can make Brexit look good. But at least the pot plants managed to get on the table and to sit there looking pretty. The trade talks, however, look like they’ll never get on the table in the first place and, even if they do ,they’re going to look very ugly.

There could be an important lesson here for the British government and the Conservative party. If the UK replaced David Davis, Liam Fox and Boris Johnson with a spider plant, a busy lizzie and a dickweed, the Brexit negotiations would be considerably further forward than they currently are and then, instead of threats of a hard border, we could be talking about a herbaceous one (a joke for my fellow gardeners). This idea isn’t as ridiculous as it might first sound as there is already a precedent: our friends across the Atlantic have had an ornamental cabbage as their President for a year now. Although, on second thoughts, there’s no real need to replace Boris Johnson with a dickweed because he already does a very good impression of one. And there’s certainly no reason to replace the much touted Jacob Rees-Mogg with a plant, because he’s already a fossil. Mind you it’s not like there’s much point in offering this advice to the Tory party, because even though many people speak to plants, there’s absolutely no evidence that the vegetables in the party are going to listen.

It took the EU leaders all of 90 seconds to decide that there hasn’t been sufficient progress so far and that they’ll wait until December to revisit the question of whether enough progress has been made to allow the UK to move on to the trade talks. And that 90 seconds included the usual pleasantries being translated into 25 languages. Can you remember the last time any political decision was made that quickly? I can't. In the meantime the EU will discuss a possible trade deal, but they won’t discuss it with the UK, they’ll just discuss it amongst themselves in the same kind of way that you make sure that a really annoying person is no longer in the room before you start to talk about them. But it did mean that Theresa could return to London with something like a victory which will help to bolster her position against the triffids in the cabinet. She could present them with a firm commitment from the EU that, in a few months time, it will consider looking at whether there’s been enough progress . And expectations are now so low that that counts as progress all by itself. It’s still all about the money. Reports are that the EU is insisting on something in the region of €60bn which the UK will have to cough up to settle its financial obligations before the EU will consider moving on to trade talks. That’s considerably more than the €20bn which Theresa May has offered, and considerably more than the red, white and blue cabbages in the Tory party are prepared to countenance. They still fondly believe that the UK is the stronger party in these negotiations, but the truth is that it’s the EU which possesses the pruning shears and the weedkiller. The reality of Brexit is that Britain is going to end up with what the EU is prepared to leave us with and that’s going to leave us much worse off than before.