May customs deal will be impossible to escape, warns Attorney General

The deal the Government is edging towards would be a constitutional, practical and electoral calamity

THERESA MAY’S Brexit deal with the EU will be almost impossible to get out of, the Attorney General has warned, amid mounting Cabinet opposition.

Geoffrey Cox is said to have made clear that ministers will not be able to change the customs backstop once the UK has signed up to it.

Eurosceptics are demanding an “exit mechanism” that enables the UK to end the backstop, which will come into force in March 2021 if the UK has still not signed a deal with Brussels.

The backstop is designed to avoid a hard border with Ireland, but Eurosceptics fear that it will leave the UK in a state of “permanent vassalage” with the EU.

According to The Spectator, Mr Cox is said to have told ministers that Britain has a choice to accept a backstop it cannot get out of, push for no deal, or renounce the backstop entirely.

It came as the Prime Minister received a warm reception at the 1922 Committee of Tory MPS last night. The meeting had been billed as a “show trial” at the weekend, with one MP suggesting that the Prime Minister should “bring her own noose”.

In the event, MPS said it was more like a “petting zoo” than entering the “lion’s den”. Amber Rudd, the former home secretary, said that Mrs May had “won the room” as MPS greeted her arrival by thumping desks and doors.

However, some MPS demanded “cast-iron” guarantees that Britain would leave the European Union and pressed Mrs May on what concessions she had secured from Brussels. Ms Rudd said that Mrs May made an “emotional” and “heartfelt” plea to backbenchers. She said: “She got a warm welcome, she talked emotionally about why she was doing this for the good of the country and how it was important that the public and our party members realise that we are behind her.”

Many MPS condemned violent descriptions of the Prime Minister over the weekend, including one Tory MP who said: “The moment is coming when the knife gets heated, stuck in her front and twisted. She’ll be dead soon.”

Michael Fabricant, another Tory MP, said: ‘‘It was encouraging. Everybody was praising her … not Daniella in the lion’s den, but a petting zoo.”

It has been suggested that Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 Committee, has received almost enough letters from Tory MPS to order a vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister.

But Nadine Dorries, a Eurosceptic Tory MP, said that the meeting was “rigged by the whips”.

She said: “Loyalist Chequers supporters will be dispersed about the room to desk bang and cheer. The whips will communicate via Whatsapp. The first questioner will already have been agreed and the questions planted. It’s a PR farce.”

Andrew Bridgen, another Eurosceptic, claimed that Downing Street was behind the abusive briefings against the Prime Minister, telling Sky News: “I would not be surprised if No 10 put those words out themselves knowing exactly how the press and the public would react.”

In the warped, looking-glass world of our Brexit negotiations, a disaster is a triumph and a victory a failure. We are told that our negotiators are on the verge of a breakthrough because, wait for it, the EU may be willing to “offer” that we can stay in what amounts to the customs union for the foreseeable future. Yes, that’s right, we would be unable to sign trade deals, remain shackled to the continent with the world’s feeblest growth, and would be debilitated psychologically, with zero control – the opposite of what most Leave voters had envisaged.

Forgive me for not whooping with joy at the news that we are supposedly 95 per cent of the way towards such an agreement. Norway and Switzerland control their own trade policies, and much else besides; we wouldn’t – not for many, many years or most likely ever. We would have to sign new treaties which, like the Article 50 charade, would be rigged against anybody seeking to leave. It would be a Hotel California Brexit of the most egregious kind, and a constitutional, practical and electoral calamity.

Yet we are supposed to be grateful: the UK wouldn’t, if such a “benign” scenario does materialise, be divided up, with Northern Ireland subject to EU rules and Great Britain outside. For Remainers, who believe that the UK is a weak, powerless, supplicant nation with no bargaining chips, it’s the best possible outcome: no change, and no real “punishment”. We would avoid being blockaded by the French, who, we are told, stand ready to ruin their own farmers by making exporting to Britain much harder, and we should therefore be overjoyed at the EU’S astonishing mercy.

Needless to say, the picture I’ve painted is a gross simplification. The reality looks even worse. The EU will still probably ask for Northern Ireland and the rest of Britain to be treated separately in a number of ways, and “we” (or rather our negotiators) will agree. The rest of the detail includes so many blatant betrayals of all of the red lines (including moves towards greater European defence integration) that Theresa May had promised to stand by that it is impossible to list them all. The package amounts to a bloodless revenge on Waterloo.

Yet if we assume that Mrs May will acquiesce to this catastrophically poor agreement, what will happen next? Predictions are impossible: one of Britain’s most prominent financiers told me he had tried to draw a detailed decision tree of all the possible outcomes and assign probabilities to each sequence, as he normally does for such events, but was forced to give up. There were too many branches, too many possible outcomes, too many unknown unknowns.

So here, instead, are a few questions. Does the mooted deal stand a chance in Parliament? The anger among Brexiteer Tory MPS is real: anybody who knows anything about British Euroscepticism will realise that leaving the customs union has always been a key objective. Bill Cash is even the author of a biography of John Bright, an ancestor of his and one of the key 19th-century free-traders. In the 1990s and 2000s, before immigration became so salient, most Eurosceptics, if forced to choose, would have preferred to remain in the single market but to leave the customs union.

In any case, the UK would also be enmeshed in much more than just the customs union under Mrs May’s plan, including extensive elements of the single market, so it is plausible that 40-50 Tory MPS will vote against it and possibly many more. If the DUP and the Tory Scottish contingent join in, their hatred of the Common Fisheries Policy meaning that they cannot countenance a never-ending Brexit, the numbers could be overwhelming. Even if 45 Labour MPS backed the deal, it could still be voted down. If it did pass, it would only be by the smallest of margins, and it would break the Conservative Party as spectacularly as the repeal of the Corn Laws did more than one and a half centuries ago.

What are the alternative outcomes? One would be to leave without a deal. As Simon Wolfson, the brilliant CEO of Next, has argued, with the right palliative measures such an outcome could be much less painful than generally thought. Open Europe has produced a must-read paper on this matter. But this would require strong leadership in Downing Street, nerves of steel and extreme managerial skills, none of which are currently on offer.

Would a no-deal – or a series of mini-deals to smooth trade – even be “allowed” by a Parliament that still cannot accept the referendum result? The National Audit Office warns that preparations have been inadequate: if true, this would represent another unforgivable failure.

This is where John Bercow, the Speaker, comes in. Shockingly, Labour Remainers have stood by him, despite the report by Dame Laura Cox, who found that a culture of “deference, subservience, acquiescence and silence” has allowed mass bullying of staff in the Commons. The hypocrisy is monstrous. Many Remainers believe Mr Bercow will find a way of stopping a no-deal by pitting the legislative against the executive, and that keeping him in power is a case of the ends justifying the means.

This brings us to a final, compromise scenario: a coalition of Brexiteers and Remainers could band together and force the Prime Minister to U-turn (or seize power). The article by Stewart Jackson, David Davis’s former chief of staff, in these pages yesterday signalled a boost for that strategy. The compromise would be the “Norway then Canada” option – temporary membership of the European Economic Area – pushed for by Nick Boles and backed by the likes of Stephen Kinnock. There would still need to be a temporary customs union, the legalities are hotly disputed and it may simply not be possible. It would buy time. Remainers who want to stay in the single market forever and Brexiteers who want to break free would work together to avoid the trap of a backstop and implementation period – but it would be confirmation that we have just wasted two years. Not much would be resolved.

So which of these or several other possible scenarios (such as delaying Article 50) is it to be? I’ve no idea, and neither has anybody else. But what I do know is that Mrs May’s Alice

“Brexit” will satisfy nobody. Something must give.