The
UK Prime Minister is off to Florence today to give her important speech on
Brexit, so important that negotiations were put on hold for a week to wait for
her pearls of wisdom. The EU negotiators
have said that they will pay careful attention to what she has to say, although
they’ve also said
that they won’t actually be present when she gives the speech.
That
declaration raised another question in my mind – who exactly will be there to
listen to her? When the speech was first
mentioned, I had assumed that she had been invited by some organisation or
other to go to Florence and that she had decided to use the opportunity to put
forward her views on Brexit. It seems
that I was being too kind to her – it is becoming increasingly obvious that
holding the event in Florence is little more than a political stunt. Not only is the speaker being flown in for
the event, but so is the audience – largely cabinet ministers and journalists. Am I the only one who finds it a little
strange that a Prime Minister should drag cabinet ministers halfway across
Europe so that they can smile, nod, and clap in all the right places as she
tells them publicly what she’s already told them in Cabinet?
This
is the expenditure of our money by the government to organise a jolly to
Florence for an event which could equally well (and far more cheaply) have been
organised in London, but is going to Florence to add a sense of drama and
import to the event. Perhaps they
believe that journalists whose employers will be paying their expenses for a
few days in Florence – conveniently just before the weekend, should they wish
to extend their stay – will be minded to provide better coverage as a result.
According
to the hype, the speech will make an offer to the EU side in an attempt to move
the negotiations – currently going nowhere fast – along a little. But if that’s the aim, it’s megaphone
diplomacy. If she has an offer to make,
why not make it directly to the EU negotiators at the talks which were
scheduled anyway rather than delay those talks to make it publicly at an event
where the claimed target audience isn’t even going to be present? The answer is, in all probability, that the
real target audience for this speech isn’t the EU27 at all – it’s for a domestic
audience. Hard reality is starting to
bite; the UK needs to give ground in a number of areas, and ‘leaving’ is
starting to look more and more like ‘remaining’, in the short term at
least. The drama and build-up to this
event is all about trying to carry the leavers in a direction which they’re not
going to like, and trying to give the impression that the UK is driving events
rather than having to respond to those horrid European types.
Whether
it works or not depends on the degree of cooperation by the journalists - and the
gullibility of the electorate.
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