A Bad Week

So over last weekend Theresa May had a big Tory summit at Chequers to reconcile the Hard-Brexit plurality with the reality of her new “Softer” Brexit policies. Policies that, soft as they are from a Tory point of view, are intolerably flawed according to the European Union and have been already rejected as insufficient.

As a blessing for her hard work and dedication her chief Brexit Negotiator, David Davies, and Foriegn Minister, Boris Johnson, have quit. Wait. This really is a good thing, Boris would be a dangerous incompetent if he wasn’t so lazy and David is an evil backstabber.

Still, May doesn’t have much of a margin and within her own caucus faces a majority of Brexiteers of varying degrees of obnoxiousness.

Having postponed the immediate collapse of her Government, May must have been extremely happy to have Trump deposit this great streaming turd-

May is not being nearly hard enough with the EU. Without a stronger abandonment of its ties with the EU the United States will not be inclined to cut a special trade deal to save the UKs ass. Alone, tossed on the tides of the World Trade Organization (which Trump wants to pull out of by the way), Brexit threatens to sink England as surely as the U-Boat.

Trump blows up Theresa May’s party in his honor
By Jack Blanchard, Politico
7/12/18

On his first official visit to Britain as the U.S. president, Donald Trump warned in an interview that Theresa May’s new Brexit strategy will “kill” any future trade deal with the U.S., backed her rival Boris Johnson for prime minister, accused the mayor of London of being weak on terrorism and said the whole of Europe is “losing its culture” due to mass immigration.

Trump’s caustic remarks to the Sun dropped online partway through a grandiose gala dinner at Blenheim Palace, which May had thrown on Thursday in the president’s honor. Things started badly. Trump arrived late, leaving the prime minister and her husband standing alone in front of the palace in silence for six full minutes before he finally rolled up.

As May, her husband Philip, her most senior Downing Street aides and half the Cabinet sat in black tie and ball gowns, just after the PM had delivered a big speech to Trump, his wife Melania and scores of U.K. business leaders on her proud hopes for Anglo-American trade, the Sun’s Tom Newton Dunn started tweeting out the top lines from the interview.

Trump said May had ignored his advice on how to negotiate Brexit and “went the opposite way” instead. “I would have done it much differently,” Trump told the Sun. “I actually told Theresa May how to do it, but she didn’t agree, didn’t listen to me.”

He added: “If they do a deal like that, we would be dealing with the European Union instead of dealing with the U.K., so it will probably kill the deal. Because we have enough difficulty with the European Union. We are cracking down right now on the European Union, because they have not treated the United States fairly on trade.”

A long-awaited white paper published on Thursday outlining her vision for the U.K.’s future relationship with the EU revealed that the U.K. will formally ask the EU for a post-Brexit “association agreement” including a “free-trade area” for goods, a looser arrangement for financial services, alongside a security partnership and continued membership of many EU agencies. The proposed relationship would require continued close cooperation with the EU, including “regular dialogue between U.K. and EU leaders.” May’s Brexit strategy led to the resignations of both her Brexit Secretary David Davis and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson earlier this week.

Most brutally of all, according to the Washington Post, No. 10 was told about the interview on Thursday, but assured it would be positive.