Portrait of the week: More Brexit chaos, royal complaints and Syrian fighting

Home

The Commons voted by 329 to 299 for a Brexit Withdrawal Bill but then stymied progress by defeating a timetable for enacting it by 31 October. Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, immediately favoured a delay for Brexit. Downing Street called for a general election. Sir Oliver Letwin had torpedoed the government’s Brexit endeavours by amending a motion that had been intended to secure the Commons’ ‘meaningful vote’ for the withdrawal agreement triumphantly secured from the EU by Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, only three days earlier. The Commons, sitting on a Saturday for the first time since the Falklands War of 1982, voted by 322 to 306 in favour of Sir Oliver’s amendment, which stipulated that the House would not approve the agreement until legislation had been passed to bring it into British law. The government had already lost the support of the DUP, which was angered by provisions in the withdrawal agreement that imposed different customs and VAT arrangements on Northern Ireland from those elsewhere in the United Kingdom.