Brexit: Sufficient Unto the Day. EPC Discussion Paper 3 October 2017

Duff, Andrew (2017) Brexit: Sufficient Unto the Day. EPC Discussion Paper 3 October 2017. [Discussion Paper]

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Abstract

If context is everything, what are we to make of a British prime minister making a speech on Europe in a gloomy cloister of a Florentine church? Her audience was the Westminster press lobby, flown out and back on fat expenses, and a clutch of patronised and bewildered Italian dignitaries. Surely the event cannot have been part of the government's charm offensive launched to demonstrate that Britain's Rolls-Royce diplomacy will continue effortlessly after Brexit? Indeed, the spectacle in the cloister (probably the brainchild of a Tory-boy press officer) was pretty desperate. Florence has other more dignified venues, notably the European University Institute at Badia Fiesolana. Compare just for a moment the tortured delivery of Theresa May in the artificial contrivance of Santa Maria Novella (22 September) to the effortless fluency of Emmanuel Macron in his natural habitat of the Sorbonne (26 September). Politics is cruel.

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