Portrait of the week | 4 April 2019

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Brexit exerted ever stranger effects on politics. After an eight-hour cabinet meeting, Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said she would ‘sit down’ with Jeremy Corbyn ‘to try to agree a plan’, though it ‘would have to agree the current withdrawal agreement’. The United Kingdom had been required to present a plan to a European Council summit on 10 April in order to be granted a long extension of the Article 50 process, or else leave the European Union on 12 April with no withdrawal agreement. But now Mrs May wanted a short extension, to pass a withdrawal bill before 22 May and avoid EU elections due the next day. MPs had already voted by 344 to 286 to reject the government’s withdrawal agreement for a third time, despite her promise that she would resign if they passed it. Although Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg had changed their tune and voted with the government, the Democratic Unionist party did not; Richard Drax voted with the government and later apologised to the House for having done so.