Theresa May vs Brussels: what’s the game?

Theresa May is clearly relishing the headlines spawned by Brussels leaks. She has stoked them by digging up Ken Clarke’s overheard description of her as a “bloody difficult woman.”

It’s been said that the senior EU source who briefed Frankfurter Allgemeine might’ve been trying to get Theresa May to change tack and drop what Brussels sees as a rigid position.

But this was, remember, an account briefed to a rather conservative German newspaper. It was accompanied by a phone call to Chancellor Merkel. One who speaks regularly to the Eurocrat elite says he is convinced that it was a cry of pain from Brussels to Berlin along the lines of “we’re dealing with crazies here…don’t go soft, stick with the hard line, stick with France.”

Tonight, on the anniversary of the 1997 Tony Blair landslide, a small dinner is taking place in the last moments of this Parliament. It is small and select because it celebrates those Tory MPs who came into the Commons in 1997 and are still sitting. Labour MPs poured into the Commons that year, many of them with no expectation of ever getting elected, swept along by the 10% swing.

Many of the diners now think their party is going to inflict a 1997-style defeat on Labour, to reverse the historical rout. They must be out of Parliament by midnight when dissolution takes effect. From that point they are no longer MPs, they are the mercy of the voters – voters they think are about to be merciless to the other side.