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Courtesy of the Sunday Times.
The promise to unite the country was one of the more comprehensible pledges in Theresa May’s “Brexit means Brexit” pitch to be prime minister. So far she has failed to deliver unity as surely as she broke her promise not to have an early general election. An extensive Survation opinion poll taken after last Tuesday’s Commons drama found that the nation is still divided into three camps: those keen on Brexit, those reluctant and those who can’t make up their minds. The split is not always even, but there is seldom a majority opinion among the citizens surveyed, as in the House of Commons.
“If the UK does not change its position would you support or oppose the UK leaving without a deal?” Support 41%; oppose 44%; don’t know 16%. “How about a softer Brexit in these circumstances?” Support 40%; oppose 35%; don’t know 25%. There is a slight tilt to the remain side on most questions, including the big one (referendum voting intention: leave 45%; remain 55%), but not enough for either side to claim a new mandate. Still, for the first time last week May did manage to unite almost all Conservative MPs (except eight rebels) and the Democratic Unionist Party behind her withdrawal agreement, as modified by Sir Graham Brady’s amendment to find “alternative arrangements” to the Irish backstop.
With less than eight weeks to go until Britain is due to leave the EU, the essential question is whether the Tory party can stay united long enough to deliver an orderly Brexit, especially after the icy initial refusal by the EU’s 27 other member states to renegotiate. The European Research Group (ERG) is a party within a party. The only people reluctant to admit this are its members, who simultaneously boast of their power to destroy the plans put forward by their own Conservative Party leader. Either way, the group’s decision to swing behind the Brady amendment last week handed May a qualified victory.
On the eve of the vote Sir Bernard Jenkin declared that the ERG would not back Brady’s amendment because it was not specific enough. That changed overnight as the news emerged that a so-called Malthouse compromise had been crafted by a younger generation of Tory MPs. The fact of this compromise is more important than its content. It signals that warriors on both sides of the Brexit war are exhausted and coming to realise that total victory will not be theirs. Instead remainer lambs, including the former minister Nicky Morgan, had indeed lain down with leaver lions, including the middle-ranking minister Kit Malthouse and the ERG commanders Steve Baker and the rebranded “Jake” Rees-Mogg. Tory colleagues of all shapes and sizes, including Jenkin, applauded them for getting together.
The Malthouse compromise is compatible with the Brady amendment. Closely examined, it reads more like a ladder for the ERG to climb down from opposition to May’s deal than a trap to pitch her and the rest of the UK into a no-deal Brexit should she not secure the specified “legal text to amend the withdrawal agreement to replace the backstop with an acceptable indefinite solution set out in A Better Deal”. A Better Deal is the document produced by the ERG last month that postulates theoretical hi-tech alternatives to a hard border. Whether the prime minister is successful in Brussels or not, in both scenarios the compromise proposes continued payments into the EU during a transition period extended by a year to the end of 2021. This would remove the need for the short extension of article 50 that the EU is believed to be considering. But a transition period can be secured only if a majority of MPs delivers a meaningful vote in favour of some kind of deal. The Malthouse compromise implicitly makes the case for ERG MPs to keep supporting May’s efforts. It contains no bravado about a no-deal Brexit being no big deal.
The immediate response to events in Westminster by European leaders has been, regretfully, to talk up the chances of no deal. No credible actor is willing to say that the EU will reopen and rewrite parts of the withdrawal agreement reached last year. The British side has been studiedly opaque as to whether actually altering the main document is a prerequisite. The Malthouse compromise minister Robert Buckland believes a legally binding codicil on the temporary nature of the backstop would be good enough. The EU has so far offered reassuring language.
In practice the EU27 and UK government are both funnelling MPs back towards the agreement already reached for fear of no deal. Nobody wants to own a no-deal Brexit. Not even Boris Johnson, who said no deal was not desirable after the votes on Tuesday, seemingly forgetting that he had argued in his newspaper column a few weeks earlier that it was the best option.
If the prime minister still cannot win she will have the option of reaching out further across the aisle to threaten recalcitrant Brexiteers with an outcome they fear. The business minister Richard Harrington is confident that there would be a large majority of MPs in favour of remaining in the customs union should party discipline be abandoned utterly. This remains a government that does not know what it is doing, typified by the decision last week to cancel the Commons spring break, quickly followed by reassurances to MPs that they needn’t bother to turn up since nothing pressing would be debated. May has been driven along as much by absorbing defeats as by her own planning — from Gina Miller’s Supreme Court victory to the Brady amendment. Yet the two most important pillars of her pitch to her party are still in place. Her “duty to deliver” Brexit and her belief, as stated in June 2016, that “I’m Theresa May and I’m the best person to be prime minister”.
@AdamBoultonSky