Johnson hits out at ‘crazy’ Brexit plan
Boris Johnson yesterday attacked Theresa May’s Brexit plan as “crazy” but escaped a public rebuke.
Downing Street said Mrs May retained full confidence in the Foreign Secretary despite his stunning intervention on her proposals for a customs partnership with the EU after Brexit.
BORIS JOHNSON yesterday attacked Theresa May’s Brexit plan as “crazy” but escaped a public rebuke as the Prime Minister faced mounting pressure from Leavers.
Downing Street said Mrs May retained full confidence in the Foreign Secretary despite his stunning intervention on her proposals for a customs partnership with the EU after Brexit.
The Prime Minister is understood to favour the arrangement, under which the UK would collect customs tariffs on behalf of the EU, as a means of breaking the deadlock in Brexit talks on the future of the Irish border.
Mrs May failed to win over senior Ministers last week, and Mr Johnson has now gone public to warn it would create a “whole new web of bureaucracy” and fail to fulfil promises to take back control of the UK’s money, borders and laws.
“It’s totally untried and would make it very, very difficult to do free trade deals,” Mr Johnson told the Daily Mail.
“If you have the new customs partnership, you have a crazy system whereby you end up collecting the tariffs on behalf of the EU at the UK frontier.”
Mrs May’s official spokesman said the issue was not discussed at yesterday’s Cabinet meeting, which Mr Johnson attended after returning from the United States.
The spokesman declined to say whether the PM had spoken privately with the Foreign Secretary about his comments. But he stressed that Mr Johnson signed off on the customs partnership plan being included in the PM’s Mansion House speech in March, alongside the “maximum facilitation” model Brexiteers are said to now prefer.
The Tory battle over postBrexit customs arrangements is reaching a fever pitch, with pressure from Brussels to make significant progress on the Irish border issue by next month.
In a further sign of Mrs May’s precarious position and the totemic importance which Brexiteers attach to the issue, Jacob Rees-Mogg said Mr Johnson had “hit the nail on the head”.
Tory ex-Cabinet Minister Dominic Grieve said he could understand Mrs May’s response.
The Remainer rebel told BBC Radio 4’s World At One: “I can well understand that seeing the difficult issues that we are having to confront, which are very divisive, the Prime Minister should accept these rather extraordinary bursts of misbehaviour by Boris.
“I can see why, in view of the difficulties and the divisions, it may be an exercise in restraint on her part but it doesn’t make it any more desirable that a Cabinet Minister should express himself in the pages of the Daily Mail in this fashion.”
The row broke out after Business Secretary Greg Clark stressed on Sunday that thousands of British jobs depend on frictionless trade with Europe, in an apparent attempt to revive the customs partnership model.
It came as Mrs May faced two more defeats on her Brexit plan in the House of Lords.
Peers were last night on course to remove the planned exit day of March 29, 2019 from flagship legislation and allow EU laws to be replicated in the UK and allow future participation in its agencies.