Tough Theresa May will beat tinpot tyrants and EU leaders will see it was a mistake to freeze her out at summit
She is not 'muddled' she just hasn't finished her post-Brexit plans yet
EVERYONE agrees. Downing Street is in a “muddle”. Theresa May does not listen and certainly doesn’t tell.
There is no Brexit plan. We are heading for a car crash in Brussels.
At least one of these charges against our Prime Minister is true — and it explains all the rest. Silence is Theresa May’s trademark and the reason for her stupendous success.
Silence leaves a gap for unwary critics to fill — sometimes at suicidal cost, as ratty ex-EU envoy Sir Ivan Rogers found last week.
Mrs May has made her remarkable career out of being underestimated. Her quiet watchfulness wrong-footed rivals and enemies and catapulted her over their political corpses to the very top.
So they should be careful before accusing the PM of “muddled thinking” over Brexit.
The idea that she has no plan is for the birds. She just hasn’t finished putting this multi-dimensional jigsaw puzzle together yet.
She has spent the past seven months — including Christmas while everyone else was on holiday — poring over the detail.
As she told Sky’s Sophy Ridge yesterday, this is a huge and complex task which will permanently affect Britain’s fortunes — and hers — for better or worse.
“Our thinking on this is not muddled at all,” said Mrs May. “It was important for us to take some time and look at the issues.
The work has set out very clearly how complex this is but also how important it is to approach it in the right way.”
She did not offer any clues. But nobody who knows Theresa May should imagine she will trigger Article 50 in March without knowing exactly how she will proceed next.
Indeed, those who need to watch their step are the puffed-up place-men who have made such a comfortable career out of EU wheeler-dealing.
Right now, they are smiling smugly and assume they are holding all the aces.
But this Prime Minister has a record for delivering home truths and leaving her critics looking foolish. Theresa May was the first to warn the Tories they were seen as “the Nasty Party”.
As Home Secretary she silenced jeering police bullies, denouncing their culture of racism and misconduct and turning police corruption into a long-overdue criminal offence.
Most of all, she confounded the entire Tory high command by starting as a Remainer and ending up as leader of the Brexit-means-Brexit party.
These bombshells came out of a clear blue sky. They serve as an object lesson for EU chiefs aiming to make her life hell.
Brussels wants Britain to suffer. We must be humiliated in order to stop others dashing for the exit.
The last thing they want is a flourishing economy on their western flank showing what it’s like to be free.
But nor do they want to blow their own brains out. Britain has plenty of bargaining power. We are a demonstrable economic success while they are a ghastly failure. We have created a jobs miracle while they have condemned millions to the scrapheap.
We have the best armed forces in Nato and unrivalled intelligence services.
Mrs May will not make explicit threats or draw lines in the sand, but these facts speak for themselves.
“I am optimistic and ambitious,” she said. “Anybody who looks at the question of free movement and trade as a zero sum game is approaching it the wrong way.
“We are leaving the EU, we are not leaving Europe.”
So it would be astonishing if she let tinpot tyrant Jean-Claude Juncker dictate terms. It was a huge diplomatic error for Mrs May’s fellow EU leaders to freeze her out at her first summit.
She will be around long after many of the other PMs and presidents are forgotten.
By this time next year we will know exactly what she’s made of.
With some of her EU colleagues risking election defeat, she will be one of their most senior players, soon to be saying farewell for Britain.
At a guess, it will be those leaden-footed Eurocrats who are in a muddle, not Britain.
POOR Michael Fish.
He deserves an apology after the Bank of England compared its scandalously inaccurate Brexit predictions with his weather forecasts.
Fish was doing his best.
The Bank and others knew they were making it up.
Scaremongering historian Niall Ferguson trashed his reputation just to help David Cameron and George Osborne.
But worst of all, Bank of England chief Mark Carney disgracefully spread fear and alarm with false warnings of a slump.
He should have been in lockstep with Sir Ivan Rogers, who had the sense to resign before he was sacked.
