The Prime Minister’s plans B, C , D and E are all the same: run the clock as close as possible to 29 March, Brexit Day, so that enough of the critics to her Brexit plan blink at the risk of either crashing out with no deal or seeing Brexit cancelled such that it passes at the last.
In two words, the Brexit strategy is ‘Tick Tock’.
Yesterday’s conference-call cabinet meeting was a masterclass in Theresa May as bulldozer and ministers ‘sitting back’, according to one of them.
She outlined as her preferred course the only approach that stands a chance of keeping her party together, which I’ve been reporting on for days – namely putting all her effort into persuading the EU to amend the widely hated backstop so that it could become less toxic to her Tory Brexiter critics and Northern Ireland’s ten DUP MPs, her bulwark against total incapacity to govern.
The attraction of this approach to her is that – unlike adopting a Brexit that could woo Labour MPs to vote for her Brexit plan – it would not cleave her party in two.
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