Now PM’s local party gives her a warning on Chequers

THE grassroots backlash facing Theresa May over her Brexit plans grew closer to home yesterday as her own constituency chairman warned against further compromises.

In a sign of the mounting Tory anger at the Prime Minister’s Chequers deal, Richard Kellaway said the party’s activists would not accept any further concessions to Brussels.

The chairman of the Maidenhead Conservative association, where Mrs May has been an MP since 1997, said: ‘If it [Chequers] were to be diluted it would ultimately not be acceptable.’

And Don Hammond, chairman of Tatton Conservative association, the local party for Work and Pensions Secretary Esther McVey, warned: ‘This is right at the limit of what I would consider to be a Brexit and I am distinctly unenthusiastic.’ Patricia Soby, Tory chairman in the Torridge and West Devon constituency of attorney general Geoffrey Cox, told the Sunday Telegraph that local activists were furious about the proposals.

‘This constituency conducted our own survey and practically everybody was against the Chequers deal,’ she said.

In a further sign of how grassroots activists are turning up the heat on the Cabinet, Environment Secretary Michael Gove is said to have faced a ‘ bloodbath’ when he tried to defend the Chequers agreement at a meeting of his local association in Surrey Heath.

Mr Gove is said to have snapped ‘This is not a betrayal,’ when activists suggested the deal fell short of the Government’s Brexit promises.

Minutes of a recent meeting of the Orpington Conservative association, home to the minister for London Jo Johnson, describe ‘angry’ exchanges over Chequers.

The account, leaked to the Conservative Home website, says there was ‘near unanimity’ over the view that ‘Theresa May is in the process of betraying the referendum result, her own promises and commitments in the manifesto.’

Allies of Mrs May insist the Chequers proposals – which prompted the resignations of Boris Johnson and David Davis three weeks ago – is the only plan that has a chance of being agreed with Brussels and passed by Parliament.

Mrs May has insisted the deal does not cross her negotiating ‘red lines’, which included the ability to strike trade deals and an end to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Britain, as set out in her Lancaster House speech in January last year.

But the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier dealt the deal a serious blow last week, saying the bloc ‘cannot and will not’ accept her compromise proposals for future customs arrangements.

And a new analysis by leading Tory QC Martin Howe warns Mrs May’s claim that the jurisdiction of the ECJ will end is ‘sophistry at best’.

Mr Howe, chairman of the group Lawyers for Britain, says the Chequers proposal to adopt a ‘common rulebook’ with Brussels on goods and farm products would be ‘not just bound by current EU rules, but also to any future changes of the rules that are made by the ECJ’.

He added: ‘It is clear that the Prime Minister has now broken the pledges she made in the [2017 Tory] manifesto and in the Lancaster House speech. Within the “common” rulebook areas at least, it is quite clear that the interpretation of the laws applying within the UK will continue to be carried out by judges in Luxembourg, with judges in the UK having only a subservient role.

‘What is even more alarming than the PM’s wholesale abandonment of her promises is her repeated insistence in the face of reality that she has not abandoned them.’

The scale of the grassroots rebellion will alarm No 10, which has launched a charm offensive designed to convince activists that the Chequers deal is true to the spirit of the referendum. Constituency chairmen have been given briefings with the PM’s chief of staff Gavin Barwell in a bid to win them over.

Mr Kellaway said the events ‘went down very well’ but had not changed the view that further compromise with Brussels was untenable.

‘I think we have reached the stage that if we don’t get a deal around these terms then we’ll have to break away,’ he added.

‘Betraying the referendum result’