Mayhem in UK as Brexit goes belly-up

We are watching a slow train wreck as Theresa May loses control and her Brexit deal goes off the rails, perhaps taking her with it.

Theresa May is facing a gloomy outlook. Picture: AFP

Brexit is broken.

We are watching a slow train wreck as Prime Minister Theresa May loses control and her Brexit deal goes off the rails, perhaps taking her with it.

Over the weekend, two more of her government MPs resigned and a cabinet minister is also considering doing just that. On Sunday she reportedly called European Council president Donald Tusk to plead for something from Europe to offer her parliamentary colleagues.

The UK parliament was set to vote on the Brexit deal Wednesday morning AEST, a deal that May and her bureaucrats painstakingly negotiated with the likes of Michel Barnier, Europe’s chief Brexit negotiator, a deal which all 27 EU member states have endorsed and a deal roundly despised in the British parliament, Brexiteers and Remainers, true believers all.

As even the chief whip predicted May was heading for defeat on the vote and amid talk that she could lose by 100 votes, which would probably be enough for her resignation, the PM deferred the vote by up to five weeks.

London’s streets have been teaming with angry protesters donning placards after last week’s mayhem: for the first time in British history, government ministers were found in contempt of parliament for refusing to make public legal advice on the deal.

We now know that legal advice confirms the Irish backstop will not allow the UK to leave the EU customs union unilaterally, that it’s Hotel California for Britain, and that Donald Trump is probably right that Britain will be stopped from trading outside ­Europe with the US or Australia or anywhere else. So much for free trade. What a disgrace.

Pressure is mounting among MPs for a vote in parliament for Britain to renegotiate the terms of the deal with Europe. Should the PM return to Brussels to get Barnier to cut her some slack, and how likely is that? Britain is frozen with fear about a hard Brexit, or no deal, with scaremongering ice-makers including no less than the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney. Another disgrace.

For those wondering where Boris Johnson is when you need him, good question. He is said to be “focused”. At a business breakfast in Amsterdam last week leaked to the UK Telegraph newspaper, the chief Brexiteer again invoked his hero Winston Churchill and that moment when, against all odds, Churchill convinced the UK cabinet to go to war against Germany, a gargantuan risk at the time.

“The City, banks, the big banks, much of the aristocracy, by far the largest proportion of the Conservative Party, the Tory Party, all deeply disliked Churchill. And yet he prevailed,” Johnson said

“And I think the only lesson I draw from that is that sometimes you do need to do the difficult thing, and you do need to take a position that everyone says is too fraught with risk.”

Among Johnson’s support base is Conrad Black, former proprietor of the Telegraph and Fairfax (RIP) and still a member of the House of Lords. Lord Black, in a recent article for American Greatness entitled “The West needs to rediscover the talent for self-government”, picks Johnson as a likely successor.

Romantic as that might be, there’s at least half a parliament of MPs who will do everything they can to make sure Johnson does not get his finest hour. One long-time Brexiteer told me there would need to be grass-roots riots akin to those Emmanuel Macron is facing in Paris for Johnson to return. Well, people have now taken to the streets.

If May is toppled, it is difficult to imagine a Remainer being able negotiate a better Brexit, let alone manage a hard one. That would leave someone like former Brexit secretary Dominic Raab, who quit cabinet and has been pushing May to go back and get a better deal from Brussels.

The choices for the May camp are stark, including ceding power to parliament to decide the UK’s fate where there will be no shortage of opportunism from Remainers and Brexiteers. A second referendum seems unlikely, as the new question to put to the people will be so open to spin. And if the answer comes back to remain, you can bet there will be riots. What then? Calls for two out of three?

Yesterday came news that the European Court of Justice ruled that Britain could delay Brexit beyond March 29. Were Johnson or any other alternative to take over, they will need such a delay. Any new British leader pushing for a tougher deal with Europe will be banking on both Macron and Germany’s Angela Merkel being weakened by domestic issues.

But if Brexit is pushed back to May after the European parliament elections, there will be a different sort of Mayhem with a new bundle of British MEPs, perhaps even the return of Nigel Farage.

Ticky Fullerton presents Ticky at 5pm weeknights on Your Money.