Two ministers jump ship
Johnson, Davis quit as May digs in on Brexit plan
British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson quit on Monday over Prime Minister Theresa May’s plans to leave the European Union, the second resignation in a day leaving the British leader’s Brexit plans all but in tatters.
After a day when the foreign secretary cancelled meetings for crisis talks at his official residence in central London, Johnson decided to resign from his position – just hours after May’s Brexit minister David Davis also announced he too would quit to protest her plans.
The two resignations leave May badly exposed at the top of a government unable to unite over Britain’s biggest foreign and trading policy shift in almost half a decade.
It also puts a question mark over whether the leader will try to weather it and stand firm in her commitment to pursue a “business friendly” Brexit, or will be faced with more resignations and calls to quit herself.
May pledged on Monday to pursue a newly agreed strategy to quit the European Union.
The departures of Johnson and Davis have raised the stakes for May, who hailed the hard-won agreement with her deeply divided cabinet of ministers on Friday to keep the closest possible trading ties with the EU.
But her spokesman signalled on Monday she would not back down over the “business friendly” agreement, saying May would now focus on moving the Brexit negotiations forward – a step EU officials and businesses have long called for.
Davis, who campaigned for Brexit in Britain’s 2016 referendum, said he had resigned because the cabinet deal had given “too much away, too easily” to EU negotiators, who, he feared, would simply ask for more.
The pound sterling rose, as traders bet Davis’s resignation would not imperil May and instead focused on the newly-announced deal that markets believe makes a “soft Brexit” more likely.
Many eurosceptics have expressed anger over the agreed negotiating stance, calling it a betrayal of her promise for a clean break with the bloc that has raised the prospect that some could try to unseat her.
But by appointing Brexit campaigner Dominic Raab as Davis’s replacement, May might hope to quell some of that anger.
Davis’s resignation may also further disrupt Brexit talks, with less than nine months before Britain leaves and just over three before the EU says it wants a deal that will mark Britain’s biggest foreign and trade policy shift in decades.