The cobbling together of a Brexit plan

A memo leaked to The Times states that 500 projects are ongoing within Whitehall.

Today’s papers

It will take another six months to devise a Brexit plan, according to an unnamed civil servant whose memo has been published by The Times. However Theresa May has said that she will trigger Article 50 in just over four months’ time. Some 30,000 extra civil servants will be needed to work on Brexit, the memo suggests, because the existing staff are struggling to cope with the timetable. Some 500 Brexit-related projects are underway but there is no overall vision of the order in which they should be executed. Matters are further complicated by the joint ownership of some strategies: the life sciences, for example, are co-owned by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the Department of Health, it states. Meanwhile Mrs May used her first foreign policy speech to the Lord Mayor’s banquet in Guildhall in the City of London last night to argue that supporters of globalisation must accept that, in its present form, it has left too many people behind, the same newspaper reports. “When you fail to see that the liberal consensus that has held sway for decades has failed to maintain the consent of many people, you are not the champion of liberalism but the enemy of it,” she said.