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How the UK lost Brexit battle politico.eu/article/how-uk… Interesting, detailed piece by @herszenhorn and @TomMcTague. Good on chronology of UK’s failure, but I think some details are missing / slightly off. This thread details the UK’s 3 biggest strategic failures as I see it. 1/9
1) Not sufficiently emphasised in piece: UK failure to work out its own negotiating position until a YEAR after negotiations began was THE catastrophic mistake. EU tried its best to make sense of UK’s contradictory red lines because UK wouldn’t. 2/9
This wasn’t a thoughtless careless error; it was UK’s deliberate strategic choice to pretend engagement with Commission process, and then appeal over Barnier’s head to Merkel in the end game. A silly plan, stated (in public!) many times by Tories for all to hear. 3/9
2) Not mentioned in article: May’s strategic failure to communicate with other political parties (and indeed her own) led to disintegration of trust at Westminster. This was avoidable. True, Corbyn would have been a reluctant interlocutor, but Starmer is very smart. 4/9
This point was made by Danish PM (wd have been echoed by Irish). Cross-party approach wd have broadened political ownership of process & maximised sharing of responsibility. UK politics of course encourages adversarial discourse, but other strategic options are always open. 5/9
3) The version I hear of the Irish dynamic differs somewhat from @herszenhorn @TomMcTague reporting, & features Phil Hogan as key Brussels/Dublin communicator. Whatever. Overall detail clear - Ireland trusted Barnier rather than UK, cos he took Ireland seriously, unlike UK. 6/9
Crucial point here: UK failed to analyse Ireland and engage with Irish. British ministers, hiding in own SW1 echo chamber, did not read Irish media (esp @tconnellyRTE) though helpfully all written in English. This cultural blindness amounts to another strategic failure. 7/9
3a) In parenthesis, Westminster failure to grasp political & geographic realities in Northern Ireland has been quite extraordinary. London views appear to be uncritically shaped by DUP, though even DUP disparage Bradley, the worst in a bad run of Secretaries of State. 8/9
Many other mistakes could be added to the list - Boris Johnson, David Davis et al as ministers; 2017 election; settled status; Salzburg; etc. But the most strategic errors were failure to agree own position, failure to talk to other parties, and failure to understand Ireland. END
