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Courtesy of the Telegraph
Theresa May is facing a Cabinet revolt after Brexiteers led by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove expressed “genuine fear” the Prime Minister is trying to force through a soft Brexit.
Mrs May was accused of trying to “bounce” the Cabinet into agreeing to “regulatory alignment” between Ulster and Ireland after it emerged she did not brief senior ministers before talks in Brussels on Monday that stalled over the controversial issue. David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, said that any alignment between the north and south in Ireland would apply to the whole of the UK, which Leave supporters interpreted as Britain remaining yoked to the EU. One Cabinet source said: “It seems that either Northern Ireland is splitting from the rest of the UK or we are headed for high alignment with the EU, which certainly hasn’t been agreed by Cabinet.
Hammond, the Chancellor, used a speech to City businessmen to say that “We want to protect our existing trading relationships with the EU”, and added: “No existing trade agreement, nor third-country access to the EU, could support the scale and complexity of reciprocal trade in financial services that exists between the UK and the EU.” Meanwhile Mrs May was dealt a serious blow by the DUP, as sources in Belfast said “radical work” was needed on the text which would take “several days”.
Arlene Foster, the leader of the DUP, said she only saw the text of the proposed agreement on Britain’s withdrawal from the EU late on Monday morning when Mrs May was already in Brussels – and that its wording came as “a shock”.
Mrs May now faces one of the biggest battles of her career to salvage the deal after Cabinet ministers, the DUP and the Irish government all suggested she had gone behind their backs.