From Jenni Russell of The Times, today.
Davis is a dangerous driver of the Brexit bus.
The buccaneering optimism shown by our chief negotiator with the EU is deluded and alarming
It’s all going to be for the best, in the best of all possible worlds. That was the rosy forecast for Brexit presented by David Davis at a CEO summit hosted by The Times this week. Sunny uplands lay ahead. It would be simple to complete an EU deal by March 2019, giving us almost all the trading benefits we currently enjoy and, immediately afterwards, during a very short transition period, we would be free to sign glorious trade agreements with the rest of the world. The shorter Davis could be summarised in the words of Trump: “Winning! We’re going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning!”
There is much to be said for confidence and hope. There is nothing to be said for Panglossian fantasy, particularly when one man holds the future of our country in his hands. It did not go down well with many of those in the room: one grim-faced CEO, until then agnostic on Brexit, turned to me to say that listening to Davis had been the most disturbing half an hour he had spent in months.
His role is not to grandstand but to be a tactful, wily realist
Europe has repeatedly made clear to Britain that leaving the EU means we will trade on worse terms than we do now. Every credible economic body, from the OECD to the Bank of England, reports that Brexit is already injuring the economy. No one with experience of government, Europe or trade negotiations seriously believes that disentangling ourselves from the continent and creating a new relationship is going to be simple, quick and all to Britain’s benefit. Even Davis’s cabinet colleagues don’t share his insouciance. The chancellor, Philip Hammond, is much more alarmed by the danger of a bad Brexit, and — as became clear yesterday — has quite a different vision of where we should be heading and how long it will take to get there.
There is no basis to Davis’s confidence in what he can achieve other than sublime self-belief. The comments from those who’ve worked with him are scathing: “hates to listen to advice”, “delusions of grandeur”, ”vain and quixotic”, “all noise and bluster”. One appalled politician told me: “He has no practical sense of the realities he’s about to confront”. Businesses, diplomats and civil servants report that he prefers assertion to getting to grips with inconvenient facts.
His department, Dexeu, is finding it hard to recruit and keep staff, in part because Davis has acquired a reputation as a difficult man to work for. He is said to have learned more realism than Liam Fox and Boris Johnson, but that’s a low bar to pass. “He’s not interested in evidence when it doesn’t suit him,” says one insider. Much like the Red Queen, he is capable of thinking six contradictory things before breakfast. An economist reports: “All the evidence of economic benefits that he uses to justify new trade deals is the same evidence that he dismisses when it comes to the effects of leaving the EU.”
Jill Rutter at the Institute for Government is worried by the absence of any informed proposals from Dexeu on how new arrangements for customs, immigration or the Irish border would actually work. Businesses that have come to see Davis have been left aghast at the lack of detailed understanding. Pharmaceutical companies are afraid of losing free access to the European medicines market; aerospace representatives warned him that the plans to leave the customs union and the single market would destroy their ability to import and export parts freely, and that without that Britain’s aerospace industry would collapse. Davis fobbed them all off with vague assurances that none of this was a problem; it would all be fine. They were not reassured.
Davis cannot afford to ignore facts, whether political or economic. Britain’s dealmaker needs a shrewd grasp of our strategic needs and our relative weakness. As the country’s chief negotiator, his role is not to grandstand or cheerlead, but to be a tactful, wily, charming realist.
So far he is not up to the task. An ambassador from a senior member state, who has been briefed on how Davis is viewed by the EU now, has a crushing verdict: “He is part of the problem. He doesn’t know the dossiers well. His style is arrogant, he is full of bluster.” A European insider says Davis appears to have an inflated, jingoistic faith in Britain’s influence which is not going to play out well. “He’s going to be humiliated again and again by the EU, as he was in the first week. How will someone as vain as Davis explain that?.” Even a senior Tory peer and Brexiteer is worried by his performance so far: “I am, frankly, scared. I’d be surprised if it all went right now.”
Davis has supreme faith in his abilities. He sees himself as a buccaneering, judicious risk-taker. But his big judgments have frequently been wrong. In 2005 he thought he was a shoo-in as next Tory leader, and his overconfidence let Cameron seize the prize. He resigned his job as shadow home secretary on a point of principle that no one understood and was left in the political wilderness for almost a decade as a result. He urged May to call this snap election, and yet this week had the cheek to blame her losses on the fact that the campaign had no time to prepare.
Now all of us are at the mercy of this careless cavalier. It’s a grim prospect. His cabinet colleagues need to put pressure on the prime minister to rein him in, and force a more realistic consensual approach.
Europe can see through us. Our emperor’s emissary needs more clothes.