Brexit

Monday

James Forsyth & Katy Balls

Ministers left no clearer about May’s intentions at crunch Cabinet

After today’s Cabinet, ministers are no clearer about what Theresa May’s intentions are. ‘Reading tea leaves would be easier’, remarks one Secretary of State. This problem is demonstrated by the different messages those present took from the meeting. One Cabinet source said that May’s closing words about governing in the national interest ‘felt a bit like a farewell speech’. While another minister says that May ‘gave no impression of being off’. Part of the problem was that because May had to dash off for a phone call with Arlene Foster, the leader of the DUP, the meeting hadn’t drawn to its natural conclusion when it was brought to an end.

James Forsyth

Are we heading for a softer Brexit?

With Oliver Letwin’s amendment passing, MPs will seize control of the order paper on Wednesday afternoon to hold indicative votes. These votes will come before any third vote on May’s deal. The not-so-secret hope of many in government is that they might help the withdrawal agreement get over the line. Theory one is that they’ll show that the majority in the Commons is for a softer Brexit, and so push some reluctant ERGers into the government column. Some ministers also hope that the DUP will not be keen to go for an early election at this moment; and will be more inclined to compromise if they think that the government will go back to the country rather than accept a customs union.

Isabel Hardman

Tory uproar as Bercow insults backbencher Greg Hands

The Commons has just erupted into a bizarre row over an insult thrown across the Chamber. Normally, in these situations, the Speaker ends up scolding the MP who deployed the insult, but in this case it was John Bercow himself who provoked the uproar in the first place. Demanding that Tory MP Greg Hands come to order, the Speaker told the Chamber that Hands hadn't been a very good whip when he had held the role, which immediately led to angry roars from the Tory benches, followed by repeated shouts of 'withdraw!' Initially, Bercow stuck to his guns as Conservatives complained in points of order that he had only recently asked them to consider their language when addressing one another, and that he had praised Oliver Letwin during the debate which had preceded this argument.

Tom Goodenough

Full list: the 30 Tory MPs who backed Letwin’s Brexit amendment

MPs have decisively backed Oliver Letwin's amendment, handing them control of the parliamentary timetable on Wednesday in order to hold a series of indicative votes on Brexit. The cross-party amendment was voted through by 329 votes to 302. Three Tory ministers – Steve Brine, Richard Harrington and Alistair Burt – resigned in order to back the amendment. A total of thirty Tory MPs rebelled against the Government on tonight's motion. The decision by MPs to back Letwin's plan is a further major blow to the authority of the Prime Minister. Earlier, Brexit secretary Steve Barclay said the amendment is 'unprecedented in its nature'. But Theresa May has insisted that the Government will not be bound by any indicative votes on Brexit that do take place on Wednesday.

Isabel Hardman

Theresa May gives MPs another Brexit lecture

The most damaging thing that Theresa May did last week was to turn on MPs in her Downing Street statement, blaming them for the Brexit chaos. Given how settled Westminster seems to be on this conclusion, you might expect the Prime Minister to have tried to mend broken bridges in her Commons statement this afternoon. That she didn't underlines why so much of this mess is her own responsibility. May was not strident, but neither was she making any attempt to mollify MPs. Indeed, her only attempt to engage with MPs' role in this involved yet another lecture about the number of chances they had been given to put amendments down for a second referendum, and that any attempts to stop Brexit was 'not respecting the voters and not respecting our democracy'.

Ross Clark

Has Leo Varadkar finally come clean on the Irish border?

Without the issue of the Irish backstop, it is reasonably safe to assume the UK would be leaving the EU on Friday with a withdrawal agreement. The government would not be falling apart and businesses and investors would know where they were. But of course, as we have been told constantly by the EU, the backstop is essential. It is absolutely the only way of ensuring, post-Brexit, that the Irish border remains open. What, then, if the whole thing was a hoax – if Britain and Ireland are capable of agreeing between themselves on a customs arrangement which eliminate the need for customs formalities? That is exactly what it appears may be about to happen, if we are to believe Irish PM Leo Varadkar.

Steerpike

Why can’t the New York Times stand Brexit?

It seems that the editors of the New York Times will print any nonsense about Britain — the British live on mutton and oatmeal! — so long as it confirms their prejudices about Brexit. ‘With nothing meaningful to say about our future, we’ve retreated into the falsehoods of the past, painting over the absence of certainty at our core with a whitewash of poisonous nostalgia,’ Sam Byers wrote on Saturday. The British, who are in fact more tolerant of immigration than any other European people, are supposedly ‘poisoned’ by ‘colonial arrogance’ and ‘dreamy jingoism’. Britain, whose stock market carries more trades per day than Wall Street, is somehow a ‘backwater’.

Brendan O’Neill

Don’t be fooled by the twee placards at the People’s Vote march

I’ve had a lot of flak for describing Saturday’s march for a ‘People’s Vote’ as ‘disturbing’. Angry emailers inform me it was actually a super-polite demo at which children and even pets joined hundreds of thousands of adults in a good-natured traipse through central London calling for Brexit to be rethought. It’s true the marchers were polite. And it’s true there were pets. I saw a dog with a ‘Bollocks to Brexit’ sticker attached to its head. But the politeness bordering on tweeness of Saturday’s mass march cannot disguise its true and, yes, disturbing aim — to overthrow a great act of democracy.

Robert Peston

Will MPs get a free vote on alternatives to the PM’s Brexit plan?

A point of significant tension at this morning’s cabinet will be over whether the PM is to allow her ministers and MPs to vote with their consciences on the indicative votes today and tomorrow to find any Brexit – or no-Brexit plan – that a majority of MPs can support AND on the statutory instrument (SI) that will delay the 29 March date in law for exiting the EU. Apparently the whips want a free vote on the SI, so ministers – including some of them – can vote against it and keep their jobs. And more remainy ministers – led by Greg Clark, Amber Rudd and David Gauke – want a free vote on the indicative votes, so they can signal their support for a softer Brexit or a referendum without losing their jobs. How will the PM jump?

James Kirkup

In defence of Sarah Vine

The first job of a columnist on a big newspaper is to be noticed. If people aren’t talking about the things you’ve said, what’s the point? By that measure, Sarah Vine is a good columnist. Her name is known. At the Daily Mail she says things that people notice and talk about. She does it on Twitter too. Over the weekend, she had this to say about the anti-Brexit march through London: “There are no leavers there because they would be lynched. These people are so convinced of their righteousness they cannot see anyone who disagrees with them as anything other than a monster. The rhetoric against people who voted to Leave characterises them as sub-human.” That is a mixture of fair comment and daft hyperbole.

Sunday

Godfrey Elfwick

An open letter to Donald Trump from Godfrey Elfwick

From our US edition

Hello Mr Trump, After reading Uri Geller’s Facebook post urging Theresa May to cancel Brexit or face his mental wrath, I have been spending the past three days learning to harness the power of my mind in order to deal you a devastating psychic blow. Make no mistake about my dedication to this, in order to prepare myself I have read the following books: Uri Geller’s Little Book of Mind Power, Discover How to Develop Your Hidden Powers by Derek Acorah, and Carrie by Stephen King. I also watched The Craft and a David Blaine DVD one of my friends had acquired from a charity shop for 30p, during which, the plastic spoon I was using to eat my yoghurt definitely bent slightly. I think this adequately demonstrates to you the potential of my powers.

godfrey elfwick uri geller open letter
Toby Young

It’s time to send for Michael Gove

On Friday in the Spectator’s Coffee House podcast I suggested Michael Gove should be installed as a caretaker leader until June. I believe this is our best chance — perhaps our only chance — of honouring the result of the referendum. To be clear, I’m a passionate Brexiter and would like as clean a break with Brussels as possible. I want out of the Customs Union and out of the Single Market. If I was an MP, I’d be a member of the ERG. The disastrous course of the Brexit negotiations has made me more anxious to leave, not less.

Robert Peston

Cabinet coup or not, the government is on the brink of collapse over Brexit

The correct reports in Sunday Times and Mail on Sunday this morning that some ministers (not all) want Theresa May to go now, and make way for a caretaker - either David Lidington or Michael Gove - tells me NOT she will definitely go within a few days (though she may) but that the government is perilously close to collapse. Because what it shows is the underlying split in the cabinet between those ministers - Gauke, Clark, Rudd, Mundell - who want to stop a no-deal Brexit at any cost, and those who want to prevent either a referendum or a "soft" Brexit "in name only" - Leadsom, Mordaunt, Fox, Grayling - has become irreconcilable.

Saturday

Katy Balls

Cabinet coup? Tory MPs look to Gove and Lidington to replace May

Will Theresa May make it to the end of the week? It's a question that's been asked before of the Prime Minister but this time the situation is more serious. After a disastrous few days in which May lost the support of her whips, Remain MPs and Brexiteers, the Sunday papers report that a Cabinet coup is underway. Backbench MPs are publicly taking to Twitter to say the Prime Minister's time is up – while a number of ministers are preparing to confront her on Monday. Given that ministers have a tendency to exhibit more bravery in anonymous Sunday paper briefings than real life meetings, it's not a definite that they will follow through on their threats. However, it's increasingly difficult to see a way through for the Prime Minister.

Robert Peston

MPs have one shot this week to prevent a no-deal Brexit

As you know, I have been banging on about the probability that the UK will leave the EU without a deal on 12 April. Having talked to very senior members of the government, and also well-placed sources in the EU, it has become clear to me that MPs have one shot to prevent that - and it will almost certainly be this week that MPs will either rise to the challenge or flunk it. How so? Well, the prime minister and the EU will be looking at the indicative votes that are due to take place on Tuesday and Wednesday – on Tuesday sponsored by the PM, on Wednesday under the backbench initiative of Sir Oliver Letwin – to see if a majority of MPs can demonstrate their support for a deliverable alternative to a no-deal Brexit.

Steerpike

Revealed: No. 10 leak shows how May could delay Brexit without Parliament’s approval

Ever since MPs first voted to trigger Article 50 everyone has been told that Britain, by law, will be leaving the EU on 29 March. And if that date was ever to change, then Parliament would have to vote for it to change. That's the British constitution which can be summed up in eight words: 'What the Queen-in-Parliament enacts is law.' As the Supreme Court debacle reminded us, only Parliament can change laws that Parliament makes.  So unless Parliament can approve a new Brexit plan, then we leave on Friday next week. Only this week it all got a bit complicated. After the Prime Minister sought an Article 50 extension in Brussels this week, EU leaders offered her two options: 1. For Article 50 to be extended until May 22 on the condition May passes her deal 2.

James Forsyth

The one way to give MV3 a chance of passing

At the moment, the Brexit deal isn’t going to pass. As I say in The Sun this morning, getting it through was always going to be tough, but the errors that Mrs May has made this week have made it even more difficult. As one Secretary of State puts it, ‘She would have been much better off spending three days in bed.’ By putting no deal back on the table, she encouraged the ERG—the Brexit hardliners in her own party—to believe that voting against her deal would get them what they want. Her speech on Wednesday night criticising MPs was also ill-judged, given that they are who she needs to win over. It was particularly mistaken given that May had turned down an invitation to address her own MPs that evening.

The Spectator

The Tories have squandered Brexit – they must not waste the extension too

For many people, next Friday was supposed to be a celebration. Boris Johnson spoke about an ‘independence day’ marking the beginning of a new era of national self-confidence. But as we approach 29 March, not even ardent Brexiteers can claim that there is anything to celebrate. Theresa May has been reduced to asking, or rather begging, the EU for an extension to Article 50 — something that the EU has said it will grant only if Britain can provide a good reason for needing the extra time. So far, the Prime Minister has not provided one, apart from the prolonging of every-one’s agony. When parliament voted to enact Article 50 two years ago, the challenge seemed daunting but perfectly possible.

Charles Moore

The problem with Westminster is that politicians don’t do their jobs

The trouble with Mr Speaker, even when he makes the right decision, is his motives. Fame is the spur and so is his love of hurting the Conservative party which nurtured him. However natural these feelings, they are completely wrong for the Speakership. The occupant of the chair is supposed to be a pillar of the constitution, not its talking gargoyle. A sad feature of the Brexit story has been how so many people with important official roles have not seemed to understand or, in some cases, even to care, what those roles entail. The Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Governor of the Bank of England are supposed to assist the British economy, not invest in its collapse.

Friday

Siva Thangarajah

The Spectator Podcast: is Brexit a national humiliation?

This week opened with the cautious optimism of a third meaningful vote passing, and ends, as our cover depicts, with Theresa May begging the EU for an extension. After John Bercow’s ruling that May’s Brexit deal cannot be voted on a third time, unless with ‘substantive changes’, the chances of May passing her deal before March 29 seemed further than ever. Now, this week has shown that Brexit is dictated at home by warring factions in the Commons, and dictated abroad by the EU. Even though the EU has given May a third chance at her deal, these past weeks lay bare the government’s inability to run the government, and Brexit is on the verge of being taken over by the Commons. Has May been reduced to nothing more than the semblance of a leader?