The storm is coming – and I admit it: I’m scared

LAST Wednesday evening, Conservative MPs assembled in Downing Street for a drinks reception. Widely perceived to be a desperate, last- minute lobbying operation by the Prime Minister, it actually proved to be a relaxed event.

‘I walked in and the first thing I saw was Dominic Grieve and Bernard Jenkin having a friendly chat,’ said a Downing Street adviser. ‘It was like the Tory family was coming back together again. I thought, “Can’t things just stay like this?” ’

No, they can’t. On Tuesday, Tory MPs will walk through the voting lobbies and begin the process of tearing their party and country apart. ‘We’re going to lose the vote,’ another No 10 adviser admitted to me. ‘And when that happens, all hell is going to break loose. People don’t understand what’s coming.’

Theresa May’s aide was right about the impact, but wrong about the ignorance of our parliamentarians. They might be forcing themselves into a blissful, if convenient, state of denial. But deep down, they know full well the implications of what they are about to do.

It’s almost three years since the nation voted by a decisive margin to leave the EU. But in two days’ time, MPs will take the decision to throw that process into reverse.

At last week’s Cabinet meeting, Andrea Leadsom explained that even if Mrs May’s deal secures parliamentary approval within the next 48 hours, it will be touch and go whether the Government can drive through the legislation necessary to secure a departure on March 29.

DEFEAT will guarantee that deadline can no l onger be met, and the timetable for leaving will be torn up. At which point the decision taken by the British people will be torn up as well.

That will delight many. Those who believe Mrs May’s deal itself represents a repudiation of the public will. Those who have never reconciled themselves to the decision taken on June 23, 2016. Those who look at the impending chaos as a pathway to power or personal advancement.

But they should hold their cheers because a storm is coming. A storm with a ferocity and fury unparalleled in modern British political history.

Last week, as John Bercow unilaterally anointed himself the living embodiment of the British constitution, there was much talk of how Parliament had ‘seized control’ of Brexit. It has not. Instead, it is preparing to send our politics careening out of control in a way that can only end in catastrophe.

If our MPs were preparing to reject the Prime Minister’s Brexit plan in order to replace it with one of their own, there would be some legitimacy and rationality to their actions. The inversion of the roles of legislature and executive would be constitutionally questionable, but given the extremes of the moment, justifiable.

But that it is not what they are proposing. They are about to replace her plan with a state of enforced and lethal paralysis. Rather than grasp the steering wheel, they are opting to block off the junctions, kill the motorway lights and lash the driver’s foot to the accelerator.

Mrs May has made her mistakes over the course of Brexit. But in the end she has done her job. She has decided on a plan for Britain’s withdrawal, negotiated it with our European partners and finally secured their agreement.

And now MPs are preparing to take a hammer to it, with no regard for what should come in its place. ‘ It’s disgraceful that the Prime Minister is trying to force through her deal without proper parliamentary scrutiny,’ her critics have consistently chided.

So just after 5pm last Thursday, I walked into the Commons to see how many of our 650 MPs were engaging in this vital act of oversight. I counted 38.

The reality i s MPs have not wrested control from the PM. They are hiding behind her.

‘If she loses the vote she must come back to this House in three days to tell us what her Plan B is,’ they demand. In the full knowledge they will vote down that Plan B, just as the will vote down Plans C to Z. All while demonstrating neither the courage nor foresight to agree their own strategy.

It is no longer good enough for MPs to continue to regale us with passionate and eloquent statements of the sort of Brexit they do not want. If they wish to oppose Mrs May’s deal, fine. But they now have an obligation to the country to tell us what their own plan is to lead us out of this crisis.

Over the past months, I’ve talked to MPs from all sides of the debate. In almost every case they have spoken with conviction and sincerity. Many Leavers genuinely feel this is not the Brexit people voted for. DUP members have honest fears about what May’s deal will do to the status of their province. Remainers feel they cannot vote for something they believe will bring hardship to their constituents.

But those MPs now have to face the full implications of the step they are preparing to take on Tuesday.

If a deal cannot be agreed, there are three possible outcomes. A No Deal Brexit, a new referendum or a General Election.

People differ on the potential impact of No Deal. But those in Government do not. Every Cabinet Minister I have spoken to is privately terrified of the consequences of crashing out of the EU. Britain is no longer a nation toughened by Hitler’s bullets and bombs, but a country still struggling to come to terms with a sustained period of austerity after decades of relative prosperity. The initial impact of No Deal would come as a social, economic and political body-blow. ‘No Deal means a Corbyn government,’ one Minister told me. ‘We wouldn’t recover politically.’

Which leaves a referendum or an Election. The Brexit referendum was the most toxic campaign of my lifetime. I remember a nation tearing at its own throat. The increasingly vicious claim and counterclaim. The overt racism. And above all, I remember the murder of Jo Cox.

We must not give validation to those who in the past week have been exposed intimidating and abusing MPs. No democratically elected politician brings such vitriol upon themselves.

BUT I have to be honest. I am scared at the prospect of a referendum or Election in the present environment. Layer in the inevitable sense of establishment betrayal, the appropriation of the campaign by the neo-Nazi Right, the reaction of hard-Left activists driven by their messianic devotion to a Labour leadership that itself has openly endorsed political violence. We would be courting catastrophe. With no guarantee that at the end of that process our Brexit crisis would have been resolved.

This can’t go on. We cannot continue with a situation where our leaders are unable to lead, and our legislators refuse to legislate. The log-jam must be broken. Because if it is not, the nation will literally become ungovernable.

The storm is coming. On Tuesday it will break. When it does, our MPs will find that they, like us, have no place to shelter.

ANOTHER touching scene at last week’s Downing Street drinks party was provided by the family of the PM’s leading critic, Andrew Bridgen. No sooner had they entered than Bridgen’s wife, the opera singer Nevena Pavlovic, and their baby daughter were pounced on by the Prime Minister. ‘She swept up to them and demanded a photo,’ he tells me proudly. ‘The problem is, my wife is now badgering me to vote for her deal.’ I fear your man is a lost cause, Nevena.

WESTMINSTER was transfixed last Monday by the broadcast of Brexit drama The Uncivil War, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. But one senior parliamentarian was otherwise engaged. ‘No, the Prime Minister didn’t watch it,’ a No 10 official tells me. ‘She‘s much too busy at the moment. And even if she wasn’t, do you honestly think she’s going to choose to relax by watching a programme on Brexit?’ Fair point.