Portrait of the Week – 14 March 2019

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The government was defeated by 149 votes — 391 to 242 — on the EU withdrawal agreement presented by Theresa May, the Prime Minister. In a croaking voice she announced a free vote on leaving without a deal. Mrs May had come back from Strasbourg with two documents: a ‘joint instrument’, or interpretive tool agreed by Britain and the EU on the effect of the Irish backstop, and a 365-word ‘unilateral declaration’ by Britain, not agreed by the EU, asserting the right to take the persistence of the backstop to arbitration. The joint instrument said that the EU shared the UK’s aspirations for ‘alternative arrangements’ concerning the Irish border (such as technological monitoring) to be in place by 31 December 2020. The Commons had sat late on Monday before Mrs May and Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission, even presented the arrangements. His advice to the House of Commons was: ‘It is this deal — or Brexit might not happen at all.’