James Forsyth James Forsyth

The one way to give MV3 a chance of passing

At the moment, the Brexit deal isn’t going to pass. As I say in The Sun this morning, getting it through was always going to be tough, but the errors that Mrs May has made this week have made it even more difficult. As one Secretary of State puts it, ‘She would have been much better off spending three days in bed.’

By putting no deal back on the table, she encouraged the ERG—the Brexit hardliners in her own party—to believe that voting against her deal would get them what they want. Her speech on Wednesday night criticising MPs was also ill-judged, given that they are who she needs to win over.

It was particularly mistaken given that May had turned down an invitation to address her own MPs that evening. One normally mild-mannered backbencher tells me, ‘It was offensive to us.

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