By Sam Knight
On Monday afternoon, Theresa May announced that she was postponing a vote in the House of Commons on the deal that she struck last month to take Britain out of the European Union. The vote, which was scheduled for Tuesday evening, was shaping up to be a calamitous defeat for May, possibly signalling the end of her time as Prime Minister. It was called off only at the last minute. On TV and radio shows on Monday morning, ministers had insisted that a five-day parliamentary debate on May’s Brexit deal, which began last week, remained on course to conclude tomorrow. Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary and the last prominent Brexiteer still standing by the Prime Minister, told the BBC that he had been working on his speech over the weekend. “The vote is going ahead,” he said. Three hours later, he and the rest of the Cabinet were summoned for an emergency conference call. May acknowledged to the House of Commons this afternoon that her deal, in its present form, would be rejected by M.P.s by “a significant margin.”
The delay accentuates the sensation that Brexit, and British politics, is now entering a black hole, in which anything is possible. May is not an enthralling figure. Her flaws are plain to see. But her strategy for steering the nation through its deepest and most complex political crisis of the past half-century has functioned until this moment. May took office in 2016, shortly after the U.K. unexpectedly voted to leave the E.U. Earlier this year, she began to reveal a series of messy compromises that would achieve Brexit but allow Britain to stay more or less entwined with its largest trading partner. Several ministers, including Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, and David Davis, the Brexit negotiator, resigned. But May’s plan, and her leadership, remained intact. Her Conservative government, which does not have a majority in Parliament, won every vote that it needed to, sometimes by a slim margin, and the mighty business progressed. That changed with the publication of May’s final deal, the result of eighteen months of agonizing negotiations with the E.U., on November 14th. Since then, the authority has been whooshing out of Downing Street like air from a balloon. In eleven years in office, Margaret Thatcher lost four votes in the House of Commons. Last Wednesday, in a prelude to the main event this week, May suffered three Brexit-related defeats in sixty-three minutes.
She can put off the final reckoning in Westminster for only so long. For Britain to leave the E.U. in an orderly fashion, the Withdrawal Agreement, as it is known, must be approved by the House of Commons, the European Parliament, and a majority of the bloc’s twenty-seven remaining members. In recent weeks, May has promoted her deal without pause. She has toured the country. She has called in to radio shows. She has spent more than thirteen hours on her feet in the Commons, arguing the plan’s merits with M.P.s from all parties. The more she has talked, the worse it has got. May’s deal is ungainly. There’s something for everyone to dislike. Brexiteers can’t stand a range of technical provisions that could, in theory, bind Britain to the E.U.’s regulations for years to come. Remainers are depressed because the outcome is so much worse than what Britons used to have. Ahead of the planned vote, more than a hundred Conservative M.P.s—a phenomenal number, a third of the party’s total—announced that they would be voting against the Prime Minister. The Conservatives’ supposed allies in Westminster, the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party, have long since flown the roost. The Labour Party smells power and is doing everything it can to bring the government down. “We know how to do this,” a Labour peer told me.
I was in Westminster last week, on the third day of the debate on May’s deal. The green benches of the House of Commons were half full and dozy after lunch. Johnson and Davis sat, heads together, on the back row of the government’s side, as M.P.s read out speeches that focussed mostly on the deficiencies of what the Prime Minister has agreed to. “She has achieved the impossible: she has united the country in horror against it,” Angela Eagle, a senior Labour M.P., told the Commons. Nadine Dorries, a Conservative Brexiteer, quoted Milton: “No light, but rather darkness visible / Serv’d onely to discover sights of woe.”
The thing that pro-Brexit M.P.s really loathe about May’s deal is a protocol, known as “the Irish backstop,” that deals with the U.K.’s border with Ireland. The backstop, an insurance policy in case future negotiations break down, could leave Britain inside the E.U.’s customs union, theoretically forever. Although neither side wants this, Brexiteers have come to regard the backstop as inevitable, like millenarians contemplating an ill sign. “It will precede the breakup of the Union,” Dorries said in Parliament. She was followed by Angus MacNeil, of the Scottish National Party, who compared Brexit to a piece of Laurel and Hardy slapstick. “Crazy, silly, nuts, wacky, cuckoo, potty, daft, cracked, dippy, bonkers—the list goes on,” MacNeil said. “In Gaelic, I could say that it is gòrach, faoin, amaideach, caoicheil, air bhoil—the list again goes on.” Damian Green, a former Conservative minister who in 2017 briefly served as May’s de-facto deputy, was one of the few voices to support the Prime Minister. Green warned of the risks that would follow if Parliament voted down May’s agreement, including the danger of Britain leaving the E.U. next spring with no deal at all, a calamity that would threaten food supplies, crash the pound and bring about a prolonged recession. “I am afraid,” Green said. “I am afraid for my constituents and my country if no deal is where we find ourselves in March.”
So what happens now? On Monday afternoon, May told M.P.s that she would go back to Brussels to seek further “assurances” around the Irish backstop. Many Brexiteers want her to get rid of it altogether, but that is not going to happen. Altering anything in the Brexit deal, which is five hundred and eighty-four pages, let alone its most contentious element, is probably beyond May. “We are talking about what I would call the order of cosmetics,” a senior E.U. official told me. “If she wants to renegotiate the treaty, we are in trouble. This is not something that we do overnight.” The problems are personal as well as political. For the E.U. to grant a meaningful change to the Brexit agreement, it would not only require the blessings of France, Spain, and Ireland—which are already uneasy about the current version—it would require a new British Prime Minister to sell it, too. “She cannot be the person carrying on the renegotiation with Brussels, because she has made a deal with Brussels,” the official said. “If we are in that area, it will probably be with a change of leadership.”
If May can’t change her deal, then something else will have to give. In recent weeks, as the Prime Minister’s problems have mounted, talk has increased of a general election or—more breathlessly—a second referendum on leaving the E.U. Both would come with their own complications, and both would require the support of the House of Commons, which is in short supply for anything at the moment. As things stand, the only part of Brexit written into Britain’s statute books is a time and a date: 11 p.m., March 29, 2019. Unless a plan is agreed to, the U.K. will crash out of the E.U. without a formal economic or diplomatic relationship of any kind—a previously unthinkable scenario that becomes more thinkable with each passing day. “The problem is that Brexit is everything but rationality,” the E.U. official told me. This afternoon, the pound fell to a twenty-month low against the dollar. May said that she would step up contingency planning for a no-deal Brexit as she plots her final, desperate negotiation. “If we will the ends, we must also will the means,” she told M.P.s. But Britain is a country that only knows what it doesn’t want. Without an end, there are no means. And there is no safety in sight.
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