‘The Brexit dream is dying’, says Johnson
Boris Johnson accused Theresa May of killing Brexit as he resigned yesterday and plunged the prime minister’s leadership into crisis.
The former foreign secretary told May the Brexit ‘‘dream is dying, suffocated by self-doubt’’ and accused her of raising the ‘‘white flag’’ of surrender to the EU.
Under May’s Brexit plan, Johnson predicted that ‘‘we are truly headed for the status of a colony’’.
Johnson’s departure, which came less than 24 hours after David Davis and Steve Baker quit the Brexit department, was the most dramatic ministerial resignation since Geoffrey Howe quit as deputy prime minister in 1990, bringing about the downfall of Margaret Thatcher.
It inflicted a brutal blow to the authority of the prime minister, who later insisted she would stay and fight for reelection should MPs force a noconfidence vote. Downing Street said she believed she would win.
May told Johnson she was ‘‘sorry, and a little surprised’’ by his departure, ‘‘after the productive discussions we had at Chequers on Friday’’.
But she added that ‘‘it is right that you should step down’’ if he could not support her Brexit deal.
She replaced him as foreign secretary with Jeremy Hunt.
The resignations acted as a rallying call to Brexiteers who have vowed to do whatever it takes to kill off the Chequers agreement on Brexit. Sources in the European Research Group (ERG) of Eurosceptic Tory MPs claimed they had other ministers ‘‘lined up’’ to resign one by one until May was forced to tear up her plans.
Yesterday, after May appealed directly to her MPs to back her, two more junior members of the Government resigned over the Brexit deal.
Conor Burns, parliamentary private secretary to Johnson, quit, saying: ‘‘I want to see the referendum result respected.’’ Chris Green, a parliamentary private secretary at the Department for Transport, also resigned, saying the Chequers deal confirmed his fears that ‘‘we would not really leave the EU’’. Other MPs were poised to submit letters to the chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee expressing a lack of confidence in the prime minister. A noconfidence vote is triggered if 48 letters are received.
Even if May survives as prime minister, her chances of getting her Brexit deal through Parliament were diminishing by the hour as more and more Conservative MPs voiced their opposition, and Labour said they would not support the plan.
On one of the most dramatic and chaotic days of her premiership, May was accused of ‘‘betraying Brexit’’ during a tense meeting with her backbenchers, having already spent almost two hours fending off hostile questions in the Commons.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, chairman of the ERG, said May had given him ‘‘no reassurance’’ about the Chequers deal and warned her of ‘‘a split coming from the top’’ if she tried to get the plan through Parliament by relying on Labour votes.