Nicky Morgan interview: EU rebels can’t have anything to do with the Labour frontbench

Theresa May took just 15 seconds to sack Nicky Morgan as Education Secretary. Morgan’s revenge has taken a little longer. First, she criticised the Prime Minister’s expensive trousers, but once she’d apologised for that, the Loughborough MP then set herself up as something far more troublesome in the long-term than a fashion critic. Not only is she a prominent campaigner against a Hard Brexit, Morgan is also the chair of the Treasury Select Committee, one of the most powerful backbench operations around.

When we meet in her Commons office, Morgan is busy planning how to make the government’s life uncomfortable through a series of select committee hearings and through a series of amendments to the EU Withdrawal Bill which have landed ministers in a spin. The government was reasonably relaxed about the Second Reading of this Bill because Tory Remainers like Morgan and her colleagues Anna Soubry and Dominic Grieve were keeping their powder dry for the Committee stage of the bill.