Theresa May’s Brexit dilemma is becoming more acute. Last week, she failed to garner the support of the Brexit inner cabinet for a so-called ‘new customs partnership’ with the European Union. Even so, May can’t and won’t drop the idea. She’s convinced that it is critical for solving the Irish border issue, and thus unlocking a deal.
But the bad news for Mrs May is that opinion has hardened against her scheme (which would see the UK collecting tariff revenue for the EU even after Brexit). Boris Johnson has publicly attacked it as ‘crazy’ and in no way ‘taking back control’. Tellingly, Downing Street didn’t feel it could slap him down for this. Even those Eurosceptics with good personal relations with May, such as Iain Duncan Smith, are making it clear that they feel the new customs partnership would be a compromise too far. None of the six members of the Brexit inner cabinet who refused to back the scheme last week are likely to flip now — and anyway, No. 10 is keen to stress that this committee works by consensus, rather than by a simple majority.
Such is Mrs May’s predicament right now that even good news brings her problems. So, last week’s local election results — which were thoroughly respectable for a governing party — are now being adduced by Brexiteers as a reason for May to abandon her new customs partnership plan. Why, because, in crude terms, the elections confirmed that the Tory vote is increasingly a Brexit one.
It’s easy to mock the idea that the details of the UK’s future customs arrangements with the EU were uppermost in the minds of voters in, say, Pendle, when they went to vote last week.
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