To achieve anything in EU diplomacy it helps to speak European. That does not require a command of continental languages. What matters, when dealing at the highest level in Brussels, is an ability to acknowledge the common political and economic interests that underpin the whole European project.
Theresa May has no fluency in that idiom. She cannot even fake it. Since becoming prime minister, her relations with the EU have been marked by tin-eared diplomacy. She is bad enough at cultivating relationships in Westminster. In Brussels she has none.
The letter she sent on Wednesday requesting an article 50 extension is a case in point. Mrs May asked for the wrong thing the wrong way. There is one reason to seek an extension, and two forms it might take. The reason is to avoid crashing out of the EU with no deal. The available forms are short and long. The short route, adding a month or two, provides for a technical interlude to complete legislation once a deal has been approved by parliament. That is what Mrs May requested, although the deal has not been ratified. The longer variant, continuing the UK’s EU membership beyond the summer, is required if there is no deal and the whole process needs rebooting. That is what Mrs May should have requested. In fearful deference to hardliners in her party, she did not.
Mrs May has asked the European council to extend the Brexit deadline to 30 June, by which point she hopes that parliament will have stopped obstructing her deal. Donald Tusk, the council president, responded swiftly, confirming that a short extension was on offer, but only if Commons ratification comes first – next week. This ultimatum expresses personal frustration with Mrs May in European capitals. EU leaders can follow UK news. They can see that the prime minister has no control over her party. They know that concessions are wasted on her because she feeds them to the insatiable beast of paranoid Euroscepticism, then comes back pleading for more.
The EU made it clear that an article 50 extension should not be used by Mrs May to keep going round in the same familiar circles. But that is precisely what her letter promises. It requests permission to carry on playing a game that she has lost. A reasonable expectation, given the scale of the current crisis, was that the UK rethink its whole approach to Brexit. No one in Brussels expects great flexibility from Mrs May but it was not beyond imagination that she would bend to the will of parliament. Even that is beyond this most rigid of prime ministers.
Her crass handling of the situation has revived the peril of no deal when MPs have three times declared it unacceptable. A chaotic Brexit is not the only alternative to the current deal, although Mrs May insists the choice is binary in order to apply pressure on anxious MPs. Mr Tusk said that an emergency summit could still be convened next week where action could be taken to avert calamity. That might mean the longer article 50 extension from which Mrs May flinches. She hinted in the Commons on Wednesday that she would not continue as the prime minister of a country that was still in the EU after June. She might also be forced to name a resignation date as the price for Tory endorsement of her deal next week.
Her political capital is all spent. She has no allies at home or abroad. Her only leverage in parliament comes from the fear that her appalling management of the country provokes – the prospect that she is incompetent enough to allow the worst to happen. She long ago lost sight of diplomacy and strategy. Then she shed authority. Now she has abandoned responsibility, completing the journey from bad prime minister to rogue prime minister.