Hunt warns May over risk of Brexit deal with Labour
Foreign Secretary predicts there will be ‘no rose garden moment’ and that Tory MPS will be alienated
JEREMY HUNT has warned Theresa May that a Brexit deal forged with Labour could be even less popular with Tory MPS than the one they have already rejected.
The Foreign Secretary told The Daily Telegraph that the cross-party talks risked alienating Conservative MPS so that “you lose more Conservative MPS than you gain Labour MPS”.
He said he did not expect talks with Labour to lead to a “rose garden moment” as he questioned whether Jeremy Corbyn was “serious about delivering Brexit”.
He said: “By all accounts, while they [the talks] have been more detailed and productive than we thought and expected, it’s still going to be very difficult to imagine a rose garden moment”, referring to the coalition press conference David Cameron and Nick Clegg gave after the 2010 election.
“There is always a danger of doing a deal with Labour that [means] you lose more Conservative MPS than you gain Labour MPS, but I think the essential question is whether Labour are serious about delivering Brexit.”
Yesterday, Sir Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit Secretary, said he wanted to “pin down” the Government on what changes it was willing to make.
But Mr Hunt pointed to the splits over Brexit within the Labour Party, saying: “Labour has got hard Remain MPS in large numbers and they’ve got MPS from Leave-voting constituencies in large numbers. That is a fundamental problem for Labour in coming to any position on Brexit.”
Speaking in Accra, Ghana on the second day of his week-long tour of Africa, Mr Hunt also said this week’s local elections will be “incredibly challenging” for the Tories, adding: “My heart goes out to local councillors who may suffer as a result of politicians in Westminster failing to deliver.”
Mr Hunt, a leading contender to replace Theresa May, warned against holding a Tory leadership contest before securing a Brexit deal with the EU as he said it is “dangerous to think there’s any silver bullet” from changing Prime Minister. He said: “The process of a Tory leadership election would inevitably involve candidates setting out their red lines which might itself mean that finding a compromise to get Brexit over the line becomes harder.”
It came as Andrew Sharpe, the chairman of the grassroots National Conservative Convention, handed Theresa May a petition from almost 70 local association chairmen calling for a confidence vote in her leadership.
At a meeting in Downing Street, Mr Sharpe is understood to have told the Prime Minister that the 800-strong Convention would hold the vote at an extraordinary general meeting in June – within three weeks of the European Parliament elections taking place.
It was the first time that Mrs May had been personally confronted by the party’s grassroots over their unhappiness on the progress of Britain’s exit from the EU.
Priti Patel, the former Cabinet minister, said the “mood is dark” ahead of Thursday’s election, when the Tories are expected to lose up to 800 council seats across the country out of the 8,900 they currently hold.
If Brexit talks with Labour fail, Government sources have indicated that Mrs May will hold a series of so-called “indicative votes” to find out if there is a consensus for any one alternative to her deal. The votes could be ranked in order of preference to guarantee a result rather than holding votes on another set of alternatives that all get voted down, as happened earlier this month.
Separately, it emerged that Mrs May is likely to delay the Queen’s Speech to give herself more time to get a Brexit deal through Parliament.
The current two-year parliamentary session is due to end in June, but leaving the EU was part of the legislative programme announced in the last Queen’s Speech “and we need to finish that work”, a Downing Street spokesman said.
No 10 said there was “no specific date” for a new session, meaning it could be autumn, or even later, before the current Parliament is dissolved.