Johnson and Gove lead Cabinet revolt against PM over fears she is forcing a soft Brexit
THERESA MAY is facing a Cabinet revolt after Brexiteers led by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove expressed “genuine fear” the Prime Minister is trying to force through a soft Brexit.
Mrs May was accused of trying to “bounce” the Cabinet into agreeing to “regulatory alignment” between Ulster and Ireland after it emerged she did not brief senior ministers before talks in Brussels on Monday that stalled over the controversial issue.
David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, said yesterday that any alignment between the north and south in Ireland would apply to the whole of the UK, which Leave supporters interpreted as Britain remaining yoked to the EU.
One Cabinet source said: “It seems that either Northern Ireland is splitting from the rest of the UK or we are headed for high alignment with the EU, which certainly hasn’t been agreed by Cabinet. The Prime Minister is playing a risky game.”
Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, used a speech to City businessmen last night to say that, “We want to protect our existing trading relationships with the EU”, and added: “No existing trade agreement, nor third-country access to the EU, could support the scale and complexity of reciprocal trade in financial services that exists between the UK and the EU.”
Meanwhile Mrs May was dealt a serious blow by the DUP, as sources in Belfast said “radical work” was needed on the text of the proposed agreement for Britain’s EU withdrawal, which would take “several days”. Arlene Foster, the leader of the DUP, said she only saw the text late on Monday morning when
Mrs May was already in Brussels – and that its wording came as “a shock”.
Mrs May now faces one of the biggest battles of her career to salvage the deal after Cabinet ministers, the DUP and the Irish government all suggested she had gone behind their backs.
Last night Downing Street still could not say when the Prime Minister would next be in Belgium. Jean-claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, said Sunday was the last day on which he could meet Mrs May to agree a deal before it became too late for next week’s European Council summit to agree to trade talks starting. Cabinet sources said Mrs May had failed to seek ministers’ agreement on the idea of regulatory alignment, and made only a “fleeting” mention of it at yesterday’s weekly Cabinet meeting. The Daily Telegraph understands that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove are among senior Brexit-supporting ministers who are now concerned about the direction of travel.
One Cabinet source said: “There is a genuine fear that we are heading for a soft Brexit… It seems that the plan was to square it with the EU and come back and bounce the DUP and the Cabinet into accepting her position.”
A government source said the Cabinet had signed up to Mrs May’s Florence speech, adding: “Anyone who is suggesting that means we are not leaving the customs union or the single market is deluded.”