Rees-Mogg: I’ll vote against deal

JACOB Rees-Mogg has revealed he will oppose Theresa May’s ‘misfounded’ Cabinet agreement.

The influential backbencher, who leads a 60-strong group of Tory Brexiteers, also warned that other Eurosceptic MPs will follow suit.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, he said: ‘If the proposals are as they currently appear, I will vote against them and others may well do the same.’

He went on to describe the Chequers deal as ‘the ultimate statement of managing decline’. ‘It focuses on avoiding risk, not on the world of opportunity outside the EU,’ he said. ‘Pragmatism has come to mean defeatism.’

Until now, Mr Rees-Mogg has always claimed to support Mrs May. But after she described the new deal as a ‘significant evolution’ of promises made in her keynote Brexit speeches, he claimed she has not met her own tests of what a deal must accomplish.