May: Triumph or Humiliation?

Well, that depends how you look at it. It was an achievement  with few equals if you consider that she not only had to satisfy a Brussels machine unwilling or indeed unable to give much away, her own Cabinet which is split in every direction and her own party which is split on the fundamentals of Brexit, but also her weird BFFs, the Ulster Unionists, who have always carried principles shared by few others and an ideology entirely their own, to extraordinary lengths. So to get all of those discordant voices to sing the same note, on the same day at the same hour (a rather early one) was certainly a triumph.

But if, as will become clear when the text of the document is studied at leisure, you notice that the terms she signed up to were the same, almost, as the ones she was offered on the first day  of Stage One and, moreover, if you also grasp that the Ireland deal commits the whole UK to the same rules and regulations as the EU single market and customs union whatever nomme de plume of Brexit is finally signed up to, you will see it as a humiliation for the beleaguered May and a whopping custard pie moment for the hard Brexiteers.

And if, like this Blog, you oppose the Brexit folly in all its forms hook, line and sinker, you will pour yourself a drink and enjoy a purr of satisfaction. For this deal is the softest kind of Brexit, which is an absorbing word play for politicians, but for everybody else the same as no Brexit at all.

And when the moment comes and patience runs out, it will all be reversed at the stroke of rational pen.We will be back where we belong at the centre of the European family, of which we are and always have been, an integral and worthy part.