Crispin Blunt:

We won’t leave the EU without another general election, and Conservatives cannot win it on their own

Addressing the 1922 Committee in the wake of the 2017 General Election, Theresa May declared: “I got us into this mess, I will get us out.”

That hasn’t quite worked out, to put it mildly. The mess is now potentially terminal for her party and is certainly fatal for her reputation.

Mrs May lost the Conservative Party any remaining Brexit credibility when she failed to put Labour in the vice of “her deal” or “no deal”, choosing instead to betray her own MPS into choosing between “her deal” or “delay” – a failure of nerve and leadership wholly characteristic of her unhappy time governing Britain. Consistent with this has been the pantomime of weeks of pointless negotiations with Corbyn’s Labour Party, which formally ended yesterday.

However, it is still possible for both party and country to avoid catastrophe – just. In order to do so, we need to go back to the fundamentals

of our relationship with the European Union.

In 2016, a clear choice over the UK’S future relationship with the EU was becoming increasingly necessary. The decision of the British people to leave it was therefore a reasonable one.

But mistakes were then made. The separation of the withdrawal talks from discussion over the more important terms of the future relationship was a decision made by the EU institutions. It should never have been conceded by either the UK – for whom years of blight over the future relationship is the biggest cost – or the European heads of government, if they really had the interests of the European people, rather than the EU as an institution, at heart.

That decision has run into the predictable wall of real interests: namely, the money, the people, the huge trade deficit and, in Britain’s case, the interests of our Irish neighbours, who, being both European and British, have their future prosperity tied to our successful departure.

The denial of these key interests by those with the continuing agenda of reversing the 2016 referendum decision is palpably self-serving. The falsehoods around leaving on World Trade Organisation (WTO) terms have further corroded trust in politics, as they add to the basic problem that the Parliament elected in 2017 has collectively abrogated its contract with the electorate. This is largely an abrogation by Labour MPS, but it is the Conservatives who are most exposed, as a minority government, to the baleful influence of those determined to either reverse the 2016 decision or even worse, hobble Britain’s future by tying ourselves to EU policies at a cost of surrendering our power and influence over future policy.

Mrs May’s deal does not secure the future, but does require us to pay £39 billion for a promissory note on the future relationship. It also requires us to negotiate that relationship with an impossible legal conundrum to solve over the Irish border. This opens our negotiators to every national lobby going in shaping the future relationship. Most back-bench Conservative MPS recognised this, which was why even with the demands of a three-line whip, a majority voted against her deal when WTO was still a viable option.

The soaring support for the Brexit Party, and the polling data in advance of its arrival on support for no deal, show the public understand this too.

Our central objective must now be to deliver Brexit and restore public trust in politics. The electorate were given a clear promise in 2016, and again in 2017, and they are now rightly demanding what they were promised.

This restoration will begin when Theresa May steps aside when her deal is defeated for the fourth time. A new Conservative leader must chart the way out of this mess. This will mean facing down this Parliament and delivering Brexit on WTO terms before the serious business of negotiating our future relationship with the EU. That this will mean a general election to escape the harmful impact of the 2017 Parliament seems unavoidable. This would offer a new Conservative leadership a chance to give the electorate what they were promised.

But it is now blindingly obvious that we can’t win that election on our own, from where we find ourselves today. The Brexit Party has the potential to wreak havoc on the Conservative vote in our own seats in a way that makes the previous attrition of our vote by Ukip look trifling by comparison. This Parliament has made Nigel Farage’s case. We must now be prepared to accommodate that reality to deliver Brexit and restore some measure of trust in democracy.

That will mean some kind of electoral pact and common platform, but since the Brexit Party’s purpose was, and is, a subset of our policy, this now seems an unavoidable necessity.

Beyond the next election, the Conservatives have to rebuild as a one-nation party. It is those values that must dictate post-brexit Britain’s purpose and global role. But for now, we have to survive the Brexit political firestorm.

Crispin Blunt is the Conservative MP for Reigate