Parliament must not scupper this chance

The new Brexit deal is a personal triumph for Boris Johnson. In the last few weeks, his opponents have questioned his abilities and his motives: he doesn’t want a deal, they said, and he couldn’t get one if he did. But yesterday Mr Johnson pulled off the allegedly impossible. This new deal isn’t 100 per cent perfect, but the Prime Minister has had to negotiate with a minority Government, a Remainer Parliament and with the Benn Act hanging over his head – so what he got, against the odds, is near miraculous.

It is time for his party to rally around him. It is time for MPS to put aside pride and partisanship, compromise where necessary and deliver the Brexit they promised at the last election.

Most of the major points of contention in Theresa May’s deal are gone or, like regulatory alignment, kicked into the political declaration where they become transitional. The direction of travel in the Declaration is now what it should always have been: towards a free trade agreement (FTA). Once Brexit has happened, we won’t only be talking to the EU, which means many of those irritating regulations that Britons so hate might disappear as we negotiate competitive FTAS with the rest of the world.

Most importantly, the invidious backstop – which threatened to trap us permanently in an EU-UK Single Customs Territory – is gone. Alignment with Single Market rules will now apply only to Northern Ireland, removing the need for a hard border, and the Assembly at Stormont gets the final say on consent. Britain has an exit mechanism.

The DUP says this isn’t good enough and that they will vote against the deal when it is debated in Parliament on Saturday. They increasingly sound unreasonable and motivated by narrow-minded partisan concerns. What really angers the DUP is losing their power of veto in the Assembly, an issue over which they need to accept the new reality: if Northern Ireland doesn’t want a hard border, there has to be some kind of compromise. This is it.

Brexit was always going to involve give-and-take. After all, the 48 per cent who voted Remain in the referendum are being asked to compromise their desire to stay. The choice that Parliament faces this Saturday is probably this compromise deal or no Brexit at all – and it would be perverse if the MPS who have called for Brexit the loudest, particularly the DUP, became the very MPS who stopped it from happening. That’s why the pro-brexit Tory rebels also need to endorse Mr Johnson – fast.

For the deal to pass, it needs the support of a certain number of Labour MPS, and there’s a danger that if pro-brexit Tories don’t back the deal as soon as possible, momentum will fade and the project sink. Some of those Tory undecideds seem to imagine that they can afford to hold out because the EU won’t allow a delay – that Brussels will force Britain to leave without a deal. This is a reckless gamble just as fantastical as the DUP’S. Leavers cannot rely on the EU to deliver Brexit for them. It’s just not going to happen.

Yes, Jean-claude Juncker told reporters that he sees no need for an extension, and his words certainly put more pressure on Labour MPS to support the deal in the shortterm. But Donald Tusk appeared to contradict Mr Juncker and, if the Commons does reject the deal, it is unlikely that the EU will throw away an opportunity to extend. The Remain strategy rests on trying the patience of the public, of dragging things out to the point at which voters decide Brexit isn’t possible and they’ve had enough of it.

Mr Johnson, however, has shown with this renegotiation that Brexit is more than possible. It always was. What stopped it from happening were the mistakes of the May administration, and now that these have been corrected, now that Parliament has before it a deal constructed on the principle of consent, there is no earthly reason left to oppose it. The SNP and Lib Dems will do so, of course – their fundamentalism is a given. Labour, on the other hand, ran on a manifesto in 2017 that promised to implement Brexit. The party’s U-turn is shameful, but individual MPS still have a chance to do the right thing, to ignore Jeremy Corbyn and deliver. Those who don’t will expose themselves as fanatical Remainers completely uninterested in the views of their pro-brexit constituents.

Mr Johnson has done his part. He has negotiated a reasonable way for the UK to extract itself from the EU and laid out a future direction full of hope – of Britain as a constructive partner of the EU, trading freely with the rest of the world, in charge of its own borders and with the Union intact. If MPS oppose this vision and reject the deal, it will officially be a case of Parliament vs the people. If there is an election, the men and women who blocked this golden opportunity will face the righteous fury of the voters.

‘It would be perverse if those who called for Brexit the loudest became the ones who stopped it’

‘If MPS oppose this vision and reject the deal, it will officially be a case of Parliament vs the people’