Brexit approval in peril after 2 ministers quit
LONDON — Two British Cabinet ministers, including Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab, resigned Thursday in opposition to the divorce deal struck by Prime Minister Theresa May with the EU — a major blow to her authority and her ability to get the deal through Parliament.
A defiant May insisted Brexit meant making “the right choices, not the easy ones” and urged lawmakers to support the deal “in the national interest.”
“The choice is clear,” May told lawmakers. “We can choose to leave with no deal. We can risk no Brexit at all. Or we can choose to unite and support the best deal that can be negotiated — this deal.”
But the resignations, less than a day after the Cabinet collectively backed the draft divorce agreement, weakens May and is likely to embolden her rivals within her Conservative Party. A leadership challenge is being openly discussed.
“I cannot in good conscience support the terms proposed for our deal with the EU,” Raab said in a resignation letter to the prime minister. “I cannot reconcile the terms of the proposed deal with the promises we made.”
Raab is the second Brexit Secretary that May has lost — David Davis, who like Raab backed Brexit in Britain’s June 2016 referendum on its membership of the EU, quit in July of this year.
Work and Pensions Secretary Esther McVey followed Raab out the door. She said in a letter that it is “no good trying to pretend to (voters) that this deal honors the result of the referendum when it is obvious to everyone that it doesn’t.”
The departures — several junior ministers have also quit — are a further sign that many supporters of Brexit won’t back May in a vote in Parliament on the deal. That’s prompted a big fall in the value of the pound, which was trading 1.5 percent lower at $1.28.
Pro-Brexit politicians say the agreement, which calls for close trade ties between Britain and the bloc, would leave Britain a vassal state, bound to EU rules that it has no say in making.
Before Parliament votes on the deal — the culmination of a year and a half of negotiations between the two sides — EU leaders have to give their backing. On Thursday, EU chief Donald Tusk called for a summit of leaders to take place on Nov. 25 so they can rubberstamp the draft deal reached by officials earlier this week.
May has supporters in her party, and they argued Thursday that the alternatives — leaving the trading bloc without a deal or a second vote on Brexit — were not realistic options.
“‘No deal’ is not pretty,” Health Secretary Matt Hancock told BBC Radio 4. “A second referendum would be divisive but not be decisive.”
But May’s chances of getting her deal through Parliament appeared to be shrinking. Her Conservative government doesn’t have enough lawmakers of its own to get a majority, and relies on the support of the Democratic Unionist Party from Northern Ireland, which says it will not back the deal.