May’s Florence speech is a blueprint for keeping Britain in the EU as an ‘associate’ member

I am not a conspiracy theorist. But if I were, I might conclude that the prime minister’s speech in Florence represents the victory of Whitehall, led by the cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, over the arch Brexiteers in the cabinet. Because although it is spectacularly short on detail, it does not represent a clean break with the EU. And it seems to propose some kind of associate membership of the EU for Britain as the long-term status quo.

May proposes a new trading relationship with the EU that is neither membership of the European Economic Area and the single market or a conventional free trade arrangement. She wants our future economic relations with the continent to be more intimate than the latter and a bit less intimate than the former.

And she thinks she can get what she calls “an ambitious economic partnership” because our rules and regulations are currently wholly converged with those of the rest of the EU (by definition, since we are still an EU member – in case you had forgotten).