May’s Cabinet supports draft ‘Brexit’ deal

British premier clears one key hurdle, but Parliament members deride the agreement.

LONDON — After a fivehour meeting with her Cabinet ministers, and months of struggle and delay, Prime Minister Theresa May on Wednesday emerged from 10 Downing St. and announced that her ministers had given a unanimous nod of approval to her “Brexit” withdrawal plan.

Approval of the draft agreement, negotiated by British and European Union officials, marks a major step toward finalizing a divorce. But the plan still requires endorsement by European heads of state and the British Parliament before Brexit happens at the end of March.

It marked the end of a remarkable day in British politics — a true cliffhanger, with social media and the airwaves filled with speculation about whether May’s deal would survive the day.

At noon, May was in Parliament, where she heard the roar of her own backbench, as fellow Conservative Party members heaped derision on a deal they had not yet seen, but that they feared contained too much compromise.

Conservative lawmaker Peter Bone warned May that she was “not delivering the Brexit people voted for.”

“Today you will lose the support of many Conservative [members of Parliament] and millions of voters across the country,” he said.

Leading Brexit supporter Boris Johnson, who quit his job as foreign secretary over May’s proposals in July, urged Cabinet members to “live up to their responsibilities and reject it.”

“It’s vassal-state stuff,” Johnson said earlier. “For the first time in 1,000 years, this place, this Parliament, will not have a say over the laws that govern this country.”

A Conservative lawmaker who opposes Brexit, Anna Soubry, said voters should be offered another chance to cast a ballot on whether to support May’s deal or remain in the EU.

“What I think is very important in all of this is, the best deal, of course, that we have with the European Union, is the deal that we currently have with the European Union,” Soubry told the BBC.

Sammy Wilson, a Parliament member for Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, or DUP, which May needs to prop up her minority government, told TalkRadio that May’s plan “is not so much a deal as a double cross.”

The DUP’s chief whip in the House of Commons, Jeffrey Donaldson, said, “This is not the right Brexit.”

He said May’s half-in, half-out plan “doesn’t give the United Kingdom as a whole the opportunity to do free-trade deals and to take control of its own future.”

Outside Parliament, Nigel Farage, top Brexit campaigner and a member of the European Parliament, called May’s withdrawal agreement “the worst deal in history.”

Former Conservative Party leader William Hague told the BBC that the reported Brexit deal fulfills the mandate the voters chose when they voted 52% to 48% in a June 2016 referendum to leave the European bloc.

“If what you want is to deliver on leaving the European Union, and have frictionless trade in goods at the border for the next few years until a future free trade agreement comes into force, and have control of our own immigration policy, and keep the United Kingdom together, all at the same time — well, then, a deal is going to look pretty much like this one seems to look like. It isn’t going to be dramatically different from that,” Hague said.

The next step will be a Brexit summit attended by leaders of the EU’s remaining 27 member states in Brussels this month, with Nov. 24 and 25 penciled in as possible dates.

After approval by the European leaders, the treaty would go to the British Parliament, where it would face an uncertain fate.

Whatever happens, this deal is just the first stage of the lengthy process of ratifying Britain’s withdrawal from the EU. To follow are negotiations over trade, security and economic relations, including side deals about immigration levels.

For the last two years, the greatest debate over Brexit has not been waged between Brussels and London, but within May’s fractious Conservative Party.

Hard-line Brexiteers have pushed for a decisive split from European bureaucrats, courts, rules and regulations, while others, led by May, have sought a softer Brexit, a bundle of compromises that keep Britain more closely aligned with Europe.