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Theresa May’s first Brexit Cabinet meeting

Theresa May is convening her first Cabinet meeting at Chequers today

Theresa May is convening her first Cabinet meeting at Chequers today. Oliver Ilott takes a look at the agenda. The first item: Brexit.

In the 49 days since the last meeting of the Cabinet, a lot has changed. A new prime minister will chair the discussion, facing a room of new faces, with two participants representing completely new departments. Theresa May will be asking two questions:

Have secretaries of state done their summer homework? Theresa May will want to begin international Brexit negotiations with the clearest possible sense of what outcomes would be acceptable to the UK. Each of the 21 government departments represented round the table has spent the summer trying to answer that question by identifying what is in the best interests of the individual sectors of the economy or parts of society that their department deals with. For some departments, this is a major question to which they will currently only have imperfect answers. As the Institute has previously explained, the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, the Home Office, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and HM Treasury appear to face the largest challenges. Others, such as the Department for Culture Media & Sport and the Department for Communities and Local Government, will have had a slightly quieter summer. But the key question for the Prime Minister is whether, when viewed in aggregate, the views of 21 separate departments about what matters to them in the Brexit negotiations begin to sketch out an acceptable set of options for the UK.

What next? If, as seems likely, the reports from the 21 departments setting out their Brexit priorities do not coalesce into a clear negotiating position, then the Prime Minister’s next task is to establish how the Cabinet will agree such a position. The new Department for Exiting the EU (DExEU) will be key in this regard. DExEU’s stated remit involves ‘overseeing’ the Brexit process. But it is likely to be a fairly active, involved form of oversight. DExEU needs to flex its newly acquired analytical capacity to set out a few ground rules for Brexit work across Whitehall. Many of the issues surrounding Brexit are particularly subtle (for instance, the difference between being a member of the World Trade Organization and having your own schedules), and some of them are fairly new ground for the Civil Service and ministers because they relate to issues previously managed in Brussels. At best, there is a risk that departments will duplicate efforts in each figuring out exactly what these terms mean. At worst, they will each come to different conclusions, leaving  their work difficult to compare and so making a unified Brexit negotiating position harder to determine. DExEu needs to make sure that there is a shared understanding of the parameters of future negotiations before Whitehall departments go too far down their own rabbit holes.

Today’s Cabinet meeting will be the first, exploratory test of where the UK’s negotiating position might lie, but the ongoing work of co-ordinating Whitehall departments is then likely to fall into DExEU’s list of ‘actions arising’. Of course, a new prime minister’s first Cabinet meeting is important not just for what is discussed, but for how it is discussed. Theresa May will want to establish the tone of her relationship with the new secretaries of state and set expectations for the role that Cabinet meetings will play in her administration (although, as the Institute has previously noted, many prime ministers put greater emphasis on the role of Cabinet committees). A number of former ministers who spoke to the Institute took a fairly dim view of Cabinet meetings under the last Government; Alan Duncan described them as ‘fatuous’ and Ken Clarke lamented that Cabinet meetings are ‘merely held so that the Cabinet can be told what is going on and what they might do.’ One suspects that today’s discussion will not have quite the same tenor of passivity.

Topic
Brexit
Country (international)
European Union
Political party
Conservative
Position
Prime minister
Administration
May government
Public figures
Theresa May
Publisher
Institute for Government

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