Customs pact will rip Tories apart, PM told
THERESA May was last night warned that the Conservative Party will be ripped apart unless she abandons her plan for a customs partnership with Brussels.
Pro-Brexit MPs were furious after officials insisted yesterday that the blueprint branded “crazy” by Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson was still under consideration.
One member of the 60-strong Tory backbench European Research Group predicted that the party’s simmering civil war would burst into the open unless the Prime Minister backed down and dropped the plan.
“This is a fight we must win because the future direction of our country is at stake,” the MP said.
Research Group members were meeting in Parliament’s Jubilee Room last night to discuss their strategy, along with donors who backed the Vote Leave campaign in the run-up to the 2016 referendum.
The MP said: “The uneasy truce in the Tory Party over Brexit is over. The Remainers in our party are trying to halt Brexit and they will stop at nothing to achieve that.
“This is a debate about the future of our country because any treaty that is agreed between the Government and the EU will have a massive effect on our future direction. We have to get this right.”
Crazy
Mr Johnson savaged the customs partnership idea during his visit to Washington, saying the scheme, which would lead to UK officials collecting tariffs for Brussels, would create a “whole new web of bureaucracy”. He said: “It’s totally untried and would make it very, very difficult to do free trade deals. 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.”
Senior Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg applauded Mr Johnson, saying: “Boris hits the nail on the head.” But pro-Brussels Conservatives were angry at his outburst, described as “particularly regrettable” by former attorney general Dominic Grieve.
Mr Grieve urged Mrs May to sack her Foreign Secretary, telling BBC Radio 4’s The World at One: “I don’t think he is in any way inhibited by normal propriety in government.”
Mr Johnson faced Mrs May at a Cabinet meeting yesterday, but the customs issue was not on the agenda. Mrs May’s spokesman would not say whether they had spoken privately, but asked whether she continued to have full confidence in Mr Johnson, he said: “Yes.”
He added: “There are two customs models put forward last August and most recently outlined in the Prime Minister’s Mansion House speech, which the entire Cabinet was signed up to. Following last week’s subcommittee meeting, it was agreed that there are unresolved issues in relation to both models and that further work is needed. The Prime Minister asked officials to take forward that work as a priority.”
Mr Johnson and other Tory Brexiteers want a looser “maximum facilitation” or “max fac” customs arrangement, which uses digital technology to prevent smuggling between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. Their proposal was backed by former Northern Ireland first minister Lord Trimble, a key figure in the Good Friday Agreement which ended the Troubles.
The peer said hard border fears were “only as strong as the refusal of those who do not engage with a workable technological solution”.
He added: “Thirty years ago we found that where there was a will to succeed, to build something better, all obstacles could be overcome.”