Florence Speech: Theresa May will be finished long before her transitional deal

Before the Prime Minister’s historic Florence speech, there were two things we knew for certain. One was that it was going to be in Florence. The other is that it was 5,000 words long.

It will be interesting to see, when future historians come to assess this historic speech, which of the two things they will conclude was the more unnecessary.

Some may point to the fact that she was 3,500 words in before she’d uttered a word that hadn’t already been uttered more than a year ago. But others may choose to dwell on the television footage, which whenever it cut to the crowd, did not reveal a single face that does not ordinarily work from a desk directly above the House of Commons.

“It was here, more than anywhere else, that the Renaissance began,” the Prime Minister began in her customary monotone, the full medieval splendour of the Santa Maria Novella Church behind her obliterated by a solid white backdrop ordinarily designed for strip-lit conference centres.

“A period of history that defined what it meant to be European,” she continued, all the while staring out upon a crowd that at this time on any other Friday would be lining up for fish and chips in the parliamentary canteen.

To think, at some point in the first half of last year, I distinctly remember sitting in an aircraft hangar in Luton, listening to a man called David Cameron, standing under the wing of an easyJet aircraft warning of the devastating consequences of Brexit for the aviation industry.

What I don’t recall the biased BBC and liberal metropolitan elite media reporting at the time was that a Leave vote would require half the political establishment to take a return flight to the continent every time the Prime Minister has a lengthy pronouncement to make that could have been done in a tweet.

Transitional deal til 2021. That’s what she wants. That’s all it is. Up to the EU now to see if they’ll let her have it.

On a personal note, I spent the whole morning and early afternoon in the buildup to the big speech refitting thermostatic radiator valves. We were not more than four paragraphs in before I found myself yearning to return to it, the screwdriver all but winking at me in the afternoon sunlight.

It was, as others have said, the can being kicked boldly and defiantly down the road. She rejected the Norway model, the Canadian model, the Swiss one. Britain needs a “bespoke deal”. And to get that “bespoke deal” will require “creative and imaginative solutions”.

If this was meant to be the speech that broke the deadlock in the negotiations, it is hard not to ignore that it appeared utterly symptomatic of the deadlock itself. The EU says “this is impossible”. Britain says a “creative and imaginative” solution must be found.

The EU say their “four freedoms” are indivisible. Britain wants a “creative and imaginative” solution. The EU patiently points out that a cake that has been eaten is no longer available to be had. Britain wants a “creative and imaginative” solution to the cake problem.

Still, at least we might, just might, have two more years to work out we’ve all gone mad. And when it doesn’t work? Well, I’ve heard Verona’s nice, Ms May, or Sorrento. Hang on, 2021? I take it all back. The woman’s a genius. She’ll have transitioned herself off into the sunset long before then.