James Forsyth

Today was meant to be the day that parliament decided on Brexit. But this parliament will always choose to postpone that moment. By voting for the Letwin amendment by 322 to 306, the Commons chose to avoid stating whether it backs the new Brexit deal or not.  The next key moment will come on Monday when there will be a meaningful vote on the deal. Judging from the vote on the Letwin amendment, Boris Johnson has 306 solid votes both for his deal and a programme motion that would get the legislation through by the 31 October. So he needs to find 14 more votes between now and then. Oliver Letwin and Nick Boles have both indicated that they would back both the deal and the programme motion. This means the whips have 72 hours to find the other dozen votes they need.

The former First Minister of Northern Ireland David Trimble, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the Good Friday Agreement, was highly critical of Theresa May’s backstop. Trimble, who now sits as a Tory peer, wrote a paper for Policy Exchange on how ‘The Backstop Would Wreck the Good Friday Agreement’ In a sign of how much better the new deal is in terms of consent, Trimble has this morning issued a statement saying that the new Brexit deal is ‘fully in accordance with the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement’ and that now ‘is not the time to be looking for excuses not to implement either the Good Friday Agreement or the new deal.’ Here’s his statement in full: 'Yesterday’s agreement is a great step forward.

Both the UK government and the EU are now saying that a Brexit deal has been done. There is both a revised withdrawal agreement and political declaration.  However, the DUP are not yet on board. This makes it very hard to see how this deal can pass the Commons. At Cabinet yesterday, Chief Whip Mark Spencer went through the numbers and his calculations suggested a majority of one. His assumption was that every Tory MP who still has the whip would back it, as would 15 of the 21 Tory rebels and the DUP. The government could also rely on the support of the nine Labour or independent MPs who had previously voted for a withdrawal agreement.

Arlene Foster and Nigel Dodds are currently the two most important politicians on the European continent. If the DUP is happy, there’ll be a Brexit deal between the UK and the EU. If it is not, it is hard to see how there can be—it is almost impossible to see how an agreement that they are opposed to can pass the Commons. At the moment, the DUP have not said they are happy. I understand that there was some movement from the Irish on consent this morning. But that softening hasn’t yet been enough to win around the DUP. They would like something that would enable them to say that they – or at least Unionists more broadly—can end these arrangements if they want to. I am informed that Nigel Dodds is particularly exercised on this point.

It is one of the most remarkable turnarounds in recent political history. On Wednesday afternoon, the Brexit talks seemed pretty much dead—hence my piece in the magazine this week. Even the optimists in Downing Street were struggling to see anyway through. But by Friday lunchtime, the UK and the EU were agreeing to intensify negotiations as they searched for a deal. As I say in The Sun this morning, the negotiations going on in Brussels this weekend are serious: they aren’t just for the show. This doesn’t, though, mean that a deal will definitely be done. But things are on the move. Now, the sheer pace of this turnaround is a reason for caution.

There will be no last-minute deal. The talks between the UK and the EU have effectively broken down. It isn’t that there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, it’s that there’s no tunnel at all. The blame game is now far more advanced than the negotiations. The diplomatic crockery has been smashed even before Boris Johnson and the leaders of the EU27 have arrived in Brussels for this month’s European Council. The question now is whether the talks can ever be resuscitated at a later date —  or if we are in a world where the only options are no Brexit or no deal. The assumption had long been that as the 31 October deadline neared, one side or the other would blink. That the pressure would produce a compromise.

Earlier today, I sent a message to a contact in Number 10 asking them how the Brexit talks were going. They sent a long reply which I think gives a pretty clear sense of where they think things are. So, in the interest of trying to let people understand where Number 10 reckon the negotiations are, here is their response: ‘The negotiations will probably end this week. Varadkar doesn’t want to negotiate. Varadkar was keen on talking before the Benn Act when he thought that the choice would be ‘new deal or no deal’. Since the Benn Act passed he has gone very cold and in the last week the official channels and the backchannels have also gone cold.

The Brexit talks between the UK and the EU are making very little progress. Number 10 say that there is the ‘potential for some meetings next week’. But, as I say in The Sun this morning, there is little optimism about what will come from them. There is doubt as to whether the process will even make it into the tunnel, the EU’s term for intensive serious negotiations. One Number 10 source tells me, ‘Not going to get into the tunnel without more compromise but we’re getting to the limit of what we can do.’ There are two essential problems. The first is that Theresa May gave away so much with the original backstop.

The European reaction to Boris Johnson’s plan has been getting cooler today. But in parliament it has been a different story. In response to Boris Johnson’s statement earlier, several members of the so-called Spartans—those Brexiteers who voted against Theresa May’s deal on 29 March—indicated they would support it. At the same time, a slew of ex-Tory MPs who voted for the Benn Act made clear they were happy with it too. Frank Field urged Boris Johnson to stage a declaratory vote on this plan before he goes to the EU Council, to show European leaders that it could pass the Commons. Boris Johnson said that he would think about it but didn’t seem keen. Judging by today, though, this plan probably does command majority support in the House.

The UK government has now published its Brexit offer to the EU. It has put out a letter from Boris Johnson to Jean-Claude Juncker making the case for its backstop replacement and a briefing note setting out how it would work. In essence, it puts a regulatory border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland and a customs border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. But the briefing notes sets out the British belief that a combination of technology and checks at traders' premises would mean that there'd be no need for checks at—or near to—the border. Northern Ireland’s continuing alignment with the EU on goods rules would require Stormont’s affirmative consent.

In a lengthy interview on the Today programme this morning, Boris Johnson denied that the UK’s plans for the Irish border will require checks a few miles from the border. When asked if the UK was proposing a ‘hard border’ a few miles in from the border, he said ‘absolutely not’. But he did say that it is ‘just the reality’ that there will have to be checks somewhere.  Given that Ireland and the EU have made checks anywhere on the island of Ireland a red line, there is going to have to be movement from one side or the other if there is to be a deal.

Sajid Javid has just announced that the national minimum wage will rise to £10.50 by 2024. This is another big hike. It is currently £8.21 and was just £5.93 as recently as 2010. It will end up going to everyone over 21, not 25 as currently. The politics of this announcement are clear. The Tories want to position themselves as the people’s party, the party of the worker and delivering a big pay rise for the low paid is one way of doing that. It is also a way of promising to put more money in people’s pockets that doesn’t, directly, cost the government anything. This should help the Tories in their bid to win over traditional Labour voters in Leave voting seats in the Midlands and the North East.

At a Policy Exchange fringe meeting at Tory conference, Arlene Foster has just ruled out any regulatory checks between Northern Ireland and Great Britain that extend beyond agriculture, eliminating one of the possible Brexit compromises. She did say that she’d be prepared to consider a time limit on the backstop. But she thought that Leo Varadkar wouldn’t even be prepared to entertain this. Foster made clear that she could never accept a customs border within the United Kingdom. She argued that would be unacceptable on both constitutional and economic grounds, highlighting that Northern Ireland does far more trade with Great Britain than it does with the Republic of Ireland.