May’s fate set in stone no matter what Westminster decides to vote

As MPs prepare to vote again on Theresa May’s deal, aides are openly wondering whether her premiership is nearing its end.

Theresa May with her husband Philip May leave church at Aylesbury at the weekend. Picture: Getty Images

It was a vulgar aside, but one that captures the mood of comic despair that swirls around Theresa May’s government. After a torrid week in which Attorney-General Geoffrey Cox fought to secure concessions from Brussels, one prominent figure in Westminster declared: “If this goes wrong we’re going to stage a protest outside his office yelling, ‘Cox out’.”

If that conjures images likely to offend a vicar’s daughter, there is worse news for May. As MPs prepare to vote again on her deal, aides and cabinet ministers are openly wondering whether her premiership is nearing its end.

Officials were locked in talks over the weekend to try to sweeten the pill ahead of a new “meaningful vote” late tonight AEDT. If May loses, she has pledged to give MPs a say on whether a no-deal departure should be taken off the agenda.

Discussions with more than a dozen cabinet ministers, ministers, MPs, advisers and civil servants last week made it clear that no one could say with any certainty what the next few days will bring — or even whether all three scheduled votes will go ahead. But most agree that the Prime Minister is close to losing control of events.

“By the end of the week we could have no deal, no Brexit or no prime minister,” one cabinet source said.

Stuck between the rock of an EU reluctant to budge and the hard place of a parliament tiring of her kicking the can down the road, May faces a new plot by MPs to grab control of events and force her towards a soft Brexit.

EU negotiators have offered to make previous pledges that the hated Northern Ireland backstop is only temporarily legally binding but have rejected British demands for a unilateral exit mechanism or a time limit, making it difficult for Cox to change his legal advice that the backstop “endures indefinitely”.

In the first meaningful vote on January 16, May lost by 230 votes after 118 Tory MPs opposed her. Conservative whips fear 86 members of the ERG who refused to back a Downing Street motion on Brexit at the end of last month will oppose the deal. Twenty of them voted against May and 66 abstained. “The 20 will vote against the deal even if it comes back with a cure for cancer,” one ministerial aide said. “Par on Tuesday is 86 Tory votes against,” said a cabinet source. “Anything under that would be a birdie. The problem is that Theresa needs an albatross to win.”

In an attempt to avoid a pounding, May’s team is contemplating putting down a motion outlining the deal it wants from Brussels, rather than the one it has negotiated, to show the EU what it would take for the deal to pass. They might, in those circumstances, pull the votes on no-deal and an extension, scheduled for tonight (AEDT), and keep fighting until the European Council on March 21.

If those votes do go ahead, 20 Remainer ministers are threatening to resign unless there is a free vote that lets them oppose no-deal. Downing Street is likely to put down its own motion to delay Brexit until the end of June in the hope that this passes, rather than a longer extension. Both options are unacceptable to Eurosceptics.

Even if parliament votes for a delay, it is unclear that Brussels would be inclined to give ground.

The flipside is that in Brussels a belief that Britain will not budge has left many officials concerned that a delay might be pointless. “The working assumption in Brussels now is that we are headed for no-deal in June,” a senior Tory said.

The Prime Minister’s weakness has convinced even her allies that she might not be able to fight on for long. May has been warned by aides she might have to promise to leave Downing Street in June if she is to get her deal through. Two senior cabinet ministers, both loyalist and not usually close friends, had a conversation recently in which they concluded that May’s time was up. “She’s done,” one said.

A party adviser said: “There are leadership candidates in the advanced stages of planning their campaigns and some even have their literature printed and ready to go whenever the starting gun is fired.” A senior figure in one of the leadership campaigns said: “I think it could all happen quite quickly.”

A Tory insider said: “People feel the bar has been set so low with this Prime Minister that they might as well have a crack at it (leadership) and see what happens.’’

Despite this feverish activity, May might still spin things out for several more weeks. But her ability to delay her fate is dwindling. “There’s no long grass left,” a cabinet source said. “We’re in the f. king Sahara now.”

THE TIMES