Last Friday May
hosted her belligerent Cabinet at the PM's country residence, Chequers. It was billed as a showdown between the hardcore Brexiteers and May's own. But we now know that the showdown has only just begun. At Chequers the embattled PM went on the offensive, demanding fealty from the likes of David Davis (Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union), and Boris Johnson (Foreign Secretary). It was gunboat diplomacy at its finest: the business cards of a local taxi company sat atop a table in the entrance hall (read: if you don't get onboard you'll be fired immediately and lose your government car). It didn't work.
Davis resigned within 48-hours. He argued that he could no longer represent the government's position on Brexit in good faith (it has been suggested that he would have resigned on the spot but didn't want to catch a taxi home).
BoJo followed him out the door a day later. After months of agonising white-anting, the hard-Brexiteers have revealed their denouement. Their plan, to topple May's government and spit in the eye of Brussels, is a cavalier roll of the dice. Whether or not Davis will get his "alternative Brexit white paper" published is still a mystery. What's not is the fact that his Department for Exiting the European Union has fought May's Brexit plan tooth-and-nail, and that will continue. Brussels, meanwhile, has made its own position clear: none of this is our problem.
So May is frantically whipping her herd into order; she has implored her colleagues to get behind her or risk Jeremy Corbyn romping home in another snap election. In fact, if her government survives these next few days and weeks it will be in a much better position to push through her kid-gloves Brexit. Under that plan the European Court of Justice will retain a significant amount of power over Britain and there will be tight 'regulatory alignment'. Yet even with all these concessions to Brussels
Brexit is going to hurt.
All of which is to say that it was a week from hell for May. And then Donald Trump arrived.
The US President spent the early part of the week assailing his European allies at the annual NATO summit. In his now-familiar modus operandi the president took to Twitter while on Airforce One with threats to withdraw from NATO unless countries increased their defence spending. It was a strange position to have taken considering most members have already agreed to the 2024 benchmark of 2% of GDP. Rather than taking credit for having quickly achieved a long-promised goal,
Trump went on the attack. In front of the cameras he made unsubstantiated and outrageous claims (about Germany being under Russia's thumb), filled press conferences with invective, and repeated his claim of being a "very stable genius".
His touchdown at Stansted Airport could hardly have come at a worse time. Any hope that his freewheeling effrontery may have been dampened during the flight evaporated almost immediately. The president made every effort to avoid London (and the giant protests his presence would trigger) but the demonstrations followed him.
Something clearly riled Trump. It could be the cool reception he got from the other leaders. Or maybe it was the 'Trump baby' blimp flying above London. Either way, he was combative enough to sit down for a wholly undiplomatic interview with The Sun. In it Trump complained that Theresa May had not heeded his advice on Brexit (
"she didn't listen to me"). In his eyes May's pursuit of a 'soft Brexit' may have killed off the chance for a standalone US-UK trade deal. Trump's dismissal of others is well-known, but talking up Boris Johnson while flattening May seemed particularly churlish. Trump also used the
opportunity to insult London Mayor Sadiq Khan, a successful and thoughtful leader who has regularly challenged Trump's views on immigrants.
One can't help but wonder what the Queen thought of him.
