Revealed: Boris’s blueprint for Brexit

For the first time since the referendum, the United Kingdom has a strong government that knows what it wants from Brexit. This will make the second round of the negotiations with the EU very different from the first.

Theresa May famously declared, and repeated, that ‘Brexit means Brexit’. This was a soundbite designed to conceal fundamental differences within her cabinet about what it did actually mean. They were never resolved. Many in her cabinet, and especially the Brexiteers, thought that Brexit must mean fully leaving the customs union and the single market. But Philip Hammond, her Chancellor, and Greg Clark, the Business Secretary, thought that it was essential to avoid ‘friction’ at the border and so rallied other Remain colleagues against this approach. The absurd consequence was that 27 EU governments ended up more united on Brexit than the British cabinet. As one Brexit veteran concedes, ‘The EU attack that we weren’t clear what we wanted had a quite lot of truth to it, as we never resolved the friction question.