More unpopular than the poll tax!

Now Remainer Greening joins Tories piling in to savage the PM’s Brexit plan

‘PM can’t waste the next two months’ ‘Chequers is absolute rubbish’

THERESA May faced a pincer movement to kill off her Brexit plan last night after leading Remainer Justine Greening described it as ‘more unpopular than the poll tax’.

MPs on both sides of the Tory Party seized the opportunity to condemn the Chequers deal following Boris Johnson’s evisceration of it in his newspaper column yesterday.

The former Foreign Secretary lit the blue touch paper by savaging Chequers, saying it would see Britain handing over £40 billion in divorce payments for ‘two-thirds of diddly squat’. He also accused the Prime Minister of approaching negotiations with Brussels ‘with the white flag fluttering’.

Downing Street tried to hit back yesterday, saying Mr Johnson had produced ‘no new ideas’ and warning that Britain needed the ‘ serious leadership’ provided by Mrs May.

But the attempt to put the fragile Chequers agreement back on track soon unravelled as Miss Greening attacked the plan.

The former Education Secretary, who is calling for a second referendum on Brexit, said it was obvious the compromise plan was ‘dead’.

‘The Chequers deal is now more unpopular with the British people than the poll tax was,’ she told the BBC. ‘The Prime Minister cannot waste the next two months shuttling around Europe pretending nothing has changed, trying to land a deal no one wants.’

In a further blow, leading Eurosceptic Jacob Rees-Mogg emerged from talks with Michel Barnier in Brussels to declare that he and the EU negotiator were ‘in a considerable degree of agreement that Chequers is absolute rubbish and that we should chuck it and that what we should have is a Canada-style free trade deal’. The row came as:

Downing Street rejected calls by former minister Nick Boles to ‘park’ Britain in the single market like Norway while trade talks continue;

Home Secretary Sajid Javid urged Tory MPs to unite behind the Chequers deal;

Twenty Eurosceptic Tory MPs made a joint declaration that they would ‘Stand up for Brexit’ and vote against the Chequers plan in the Commons;

Former Home Secretary Amber Rudd said Mr Johnson was ‘wrong’ to be manoeuvring for the Tory leadership at an ‘incredibly difficult’ time for the country;

Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab prepared to update MPs on the state of the negotiations when they return to Westminster today.

Mr Johnson’s intervention sparked a fresh round of Tory infighting. The former Foreign Secretary resigned from the Cabinet in July over the compromise, which would require the UK to follow a ‘common rule book’ with the EU for goods and farm products.

Mr Johnson said unnamed elements in the Government had ‘ingeniously manipulated’ the Irish border issue in order to keep Britain in the EU in all but name.

And he claimed that the Irish government had initially offered pragmatic solutions to the issue, only to withdraw them when the Government showed no interest.

Mr Johnson said the Irish border problem was ‘fixable’, adding: ‘The scandal is not that we have failed, but that we have not even tried.’

Downing Street flatly denied Mr Johnson’s claim. Mrs May’s spokesman insisted that the Chequers proposals were ‘the only credible and negotiable plan which has been put forward’.

And, despite Mr Barnier saying he was ‘strongly opposed’ to the plan, the spokesman said there had been ‘ positive engagement’ with the proposals from EU leaders. ‘Boris Johnson resigned over Chequers,’ he added. ‘There’s no new ideas in this article to respond to.

‘What we need at this time is serious leadership with a serious plan and that’s exactly what the country has with this Prime Minister and this Brexit plan.’

Tory MP Conor Burns, a close ally of Mr Johnson, said Eurosceptics would be publishing their alternative plan in the coming weeks based on the idea of a comprehensive free trade deal along the lines of Canada’s arrangement with the EU.

But Government sources said it was clear that a simple trade deal could not resolve the problems around the Irish border.

‘The basic premise of the Brex- iteers is that there is a free trade deal on the table we can just pick up,’ a source said. ‘There is, but it is a Great Britain-only deal – we would be walking off the pitch in Northern Ireland.

‘It would mean Northern Ireland staying in the customs union, a customs border down the Irish Sea and a step towards the break up of the UK. It is not acceptable.’

Miss Rudd said Chequers was ‘the best shot we have of a Brexit that will work for the UK’, but added she would support Mr Boles’s idea if Chequers failed.

After two hours of talks with Mr Barnier, Mr Rees-Mogg said it was clear that Brussels would never accept the Chequers plan, which the EU negotiator warned at the weekend would mean ‘the end of the single market’.

The Tory MP added: ‘Interestingly, Eurosceptics and Mr Barnier are in greater agreement than Eurosceptics and the Government or Mr Barnier and the Government. It is very encouraging.’