Death Wish

“Sir, – Several leading French, German and Dutch senior managers were called by EU officials to an urgent meeting on Monday July 9^th 2018. The meeting was said to be private and those present were informed that Prime Minister May and Chancellor Merkel had reached an Agreement over Brexit. Knowledge of this was attained from the actual transcript of the meeting between May and Merkel.

1) The Agreement was couched in a way to ‘appease’ the Brexit voters.

2) The Agreement would enable May to get rid of those people in her party who were against progress and unity in the EU.

3) Both Merkel and May agreed that the likely course of events would be that the UK would re-join the EU in full at some time after the next general election.

4) May agreed to keep as many EU laws and institutions as she could despite the current groundswell of  ‘anti-EU hysteria’ in Britain (May’s own words, apparently).

5) Merkel and May agreed that the only realistic future for the UK was within the EU.

“The original Agreement draft was completed in May 2018 in Berlin and then sent to the UK Government Cabinet Office marked ‘Secret’.

NB This Agreement draft was authored in the German Chancellor’s private office.

The Cabinet returned the Agreement draft with suggestions, and there was some to-ing and fro-ing during June 5^th 2018. Private calls between the Prime Minister and Chancellor were made. The Agreement’s final draft came out late in June 2018. The German Chancellor told Prime Minister May that this was a deal she would support, though there would need to be some more small concessions by the UK to keep the EU happy.

The Chancellor and Prime Minister met in Germany. Merkel had this meeting recorded as a ‘private meeting’ though the Prime Minister was probably unaware of that.

“The Chancellor has the transcript of that meeting circulated secretly to EU and key German embassies.

Conclusions

“Documents make it quite clear that Prime Minister May was negotiating with Germany, not the EU.

The transcript also makes it clear that the Prime Minister intended to keep all this secret from ministers, especially the Brexit group. She wants to keep as many EU institutions in the UK as intact as possible in order to facilitate an easy return to the EU after 2020.

Chancellor Merkel briefed May on tactics to force Cabinet approval.

The Prime Minister and senior civil servants were working with Germany to stop Brexit or water it down to prevent free trade and the ending of freedom of movement, but to keep cash flowing to the EU.

David Davis was kept in the dark while key EU premiers in France, Holland and Ireland were briefed in full.

Key EU heads were actually briefed in full the day before the Cabinet meeting at Chequers.

Contact Philip.foster17@ntlworld for a fuller version.”

• Revd Philip Foster MA, Huntingdon, ‘Duplicitous Leaders’.

Having stumbled upon the above piece on Twitter, we contacted Revd. Foster, and received the following by way of reply:

A brief comment and excursus on 9 Lessons in Brexit by Ivan Rogers (Short Books UK).

In all the Brexit brouhaha, ‘deal’, ‘no deal’, ‘no no deal’, backstops, no
backstops, Irish border question (when has there not been an Irish
question ?), WTO etc., it is worth remembering the old Greek story of the
Gordian knot.

As the story goes, in 333 B.C. Alexander of Macedon (the Great) marched
his army into the Phrygian capital of Gordium in modern day Turkey. Upon
arriving in the city, he encountered an ancient wagon, its yoke tied with
what one Roman historian later described as “several knots all so tightly
entangled that it was impossible to see how they were fastened.”

Phrygian tradition held that the wagon had once belonged to Gordius, the
father of the celebrated King Midas. An oracle had declared that any man
who could unravel its elaborate knots was destined to become ruler of all
of Asia.

According to the ancient chronicler Arrian, Alexander was instantly
“seized with an ardent desire” to untie the Gordian knot. After wrestling
with it for a time and finding no success, he stepped back from the mass
of gnarled ropes and proclaimed, “It makes no difference how they are
loosed.” He then drew his sword and sliced the knot in half with a single
stroke.

The lesson for us is two-fold. One is that the knot was actually a
distraction. It didn’t stop anyone from doing anything – it merely, in
some mystical way, appeared to do so.

It is here we have become bogged down in irrelevance. Our Civil Service
has not actually been ‘ours’ for decades. All ministries were long ago
Brussellised (Ivan Rogers is no exception; anyone who worked for Tony
Blair is suspect anyway). The names on the Ministries’ doors haven’t
changed, but everything inside has – all inside has given its allegiance
to Brussels. They have all undergone ‘training’ in the EU way of doing
things. (See Lindsay Jenkins’ book: “The Last Days of Britain”)

Rogers, as have others, has focussed our attention on the Knot. All the
Project Fear troubles, which we were told assuredly would follow voting
Leave, failed to materialize. In fact the exact opposite happened;
employment (full time especially) rose, incomes rose, growth rose above
the EU, driven increasingly by the hope of a no deal exit. Then came 29th
March and businesses have started to lose hope again. Rogers simply
recycles all the old fears.

Remember we are in a political war with the EU. As Brexiteers, we intend
that we should win the war – not surrender as the Merkel/May agreement
intends – which means leaving as we want regardless of what the EU wants.
After all, they want the destruction of the UK economy (as they achieved
in Greece and to a fair extent in Italy). The EU was constructed for the
benefit of ‘greater’ Germany and the vanity of France. We should never
have considered doing anything else. Article 50 was a trap – the Gordian
Knot –  (written by UK civil servants who’d long gone native – as was the
EAW by the way). So rather, we should have avoided the puzzle or just cut
it through and used the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT).
This allows any country in any treaty arrangement with another to give six
months’ notice of the intention to withdraw.

Revd Foster was kind enough to include two other documents: A German Brexit ? A scandal of subversive statecraft by John Petley, and Lecture at the Heritage Foundation “Brexit and the US-UK Defense Relationship” by Professor Gwythian Prins. Copies of both documents are available to interested parties on request.

This correspondent was unaware that Hollywood had remade the 1974 Charles Bronson vigilante exploitation movie Death Wish, last year, with Bruce Willis. Before you ask, don’t even bother. As Entertainment Weekly’s Chris Nashawaty points out, it’s a deeply problematic film, not least because it’s “the absolute wrong movie at the absolute wrong time”. Perhaps even more so than the admittedly cynical original, it’s nasty, mean-spirited and dotted with gratuitous gore. A grim Metascore of just 31 tells you all you need to know.

But Hollywood isn’t the only one reheating Death Wishes. At the time of writing, the Conservative Party leadership contest had unceremoniously dumped the principled Brexiteer Dominic Raab and, egged on by hardly objective news media, was determinedly talking up Maybot 2.0 in the form of the frankly creepy ‘Rory’ Stewart.

YouGov published their latest poll of Westminster voting intention figures on 14^th June. The Brexit Party stood at 26% of the vote, followed by the LibDems with 22%, with Labour on 19%. The Conservative Party was in fourth place, with a grisly 17%.

The Conservative Party is clearly free to elect whomsoever it wishes. But it strikes this correspondent that with Raab now out, if Boris Johnson isn’t selected, the Party is over. (Which it may indeed be, in any case.) Remain-biased Tory MPs will only have themselves to blame. These same MPs will also be responsible for leaving the door to No. 10 open for Jeremy Corbyn. As Adam Smith once observed, there’s a great deal of ruin in a nation.