DO YOU WANT £39 BN OR NOT!
Despite May’s desperate whistlestop tour to win concessions on Brexit, obstinate EU leaders dig in their heels. So today we ask...
SENIOR Tories last night called for Britain’s £39billion EU divorce fee to be cancelled after Brussels chiefs rejected Theresa May’s plea for a better Brexit deal.
Eurosceptic MPs were furious when European Commission chief JeanClaude Juncker insisted: “There is no room whatsoever for renegotiation.”
The top Eurocrat’s rebuff was delivered as the Prime Minister came up against a wall of resistance on a whistlestop European tour seeking to win fresh concessions to assuage MPs blocking her deal.
Leading Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg, responding to the intransigence from
Brussels, said: “If there is no room for renegotiation then we leave without a deal and do not pay the EU £39billion.”
As the diplomatic crisis deepened, Tory plotters were reported to have stepped up their bid to force her out of Downing Street.
Eurosceptics angry at the scrapping of yesterday’s scheduled Commons vote on the Prime Minister’s deal, claimed a barrage of letters demanding a no-confidence vote in her leadership had been sent to the chairman of the party’s backbenchers.
There was growing confidence last night that enough letters have been submitted by Conservative MPs to trigger a vote of no-confidence in Prime Minister Theresa May’s leadership.
Multiple sources said the target of 48 letters has been reached.
The chairman of the Conservative 1922 Committee Sir Graham Brady has asked to see Mrs May today after her weekly question session in Parliament, it was reported last night.
Last night Peter Bone, another leading Eurosceptic, urged Mrs May to respond to Mr Juncker’s obstinacy by insisting that Britain is ready to quit the EU without a deal.
He said: “If the Prime Minister was to say that and make clear she meant it, the EU might listen. The problem all along is that she hasn’t said that.”
The demand came after Mrs May faced intransigence abroad and mutiny at home as she tried to save her deal after pulling out of a crunch Commons vote yesterday.
On her whistlestop tour after cancelling a Commons crunch vote on the package, the Prime Minister was told by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Mr Juncker and European Council president Donald Tusk that the departure negotiations cannot be reopened.
Mrs May jetted between The Hague, Berlin and Brussels yesterday to plead with EU leaders for new legally binding reassurances that the Irish backstop mechanism cannot trap the UK into the bloc’s customs union indefinitely.
She insisted she found a mood of “shared determination” among Mrs Merkel, Dutch premier Mark Rutte, Mr Tusk and commission president Mr Juncker. “What has been shown to me this evening is that there is a shared determination to deal with this issue and address this problem,” the Prime Minister said.
Dismissing reports of Tory plotting, she added: “I have been here in Europe dealing with the issue that I promised Parliament that I would be dealing with, which is the backstop for Northern Ireland and talking to leaders about the concerns Parliament has raised.” Sources in Brussels and Berlin insisted the withdrawal agreement could not be reopened, effectively ruling out any hope of changes enforceable in international law.
Mr Juncker told the European Parliament in Strasbourg: “The deal we achieved is the best possible. It’s the only deal possible. There is no room whatsoever for renegotiation.” Mr Tusk appeared to offer her a glimmer of hope after their “long and frank discussion” by insisted the EU “wants to help” but added: “The question is how?”
Mrs May is due to fly to Dublin this afternoon to press Irish premier Leo Varadkar for help to solve the backstop row.
Appearing to reject the idea of significant concessions, he told the Irish parliament yesterday: “Our
approach is that we have a deal on the table, a deal that has the support of 28 Governments, negotiated over 15 months. Our objective is to get the deal ratified by the House of Commons and that is what we will be working on over the next couple of weeks, giving the UK the assurances it may need but never compromising on the basic fundamental substance and written letter of the backstop.” She will then fly to Brussels for a summit of EU leaders.
Mr Rees-Mogg warned the Prime Minister that anything less than a legal reassurance that the backstop would be temporary would not satisfy Eurosceptic backbenchers. He said: “Warm words are not enough.”
Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, a critic of the Prime Minister, said: “People who wouldn’t put letters in are now saying – you know what, the letters are going in.”
Veteran Eurosceptic Conservative MP Sir William Cash claimed that the Prime Minister had reached “the cliff edge of resignation”.
He said: “I believe that she may well have to resign, and yesterday’s events and running away from the vote and then off to Germany, the Netherlands and the EU, was yet another a humiliation for the United Kingdom. She is clinging to the wreckage, she has reached the point of no return.
“The pulling of the vote yesterday was an insult to the House of Commons and was admission of the failure of the withdrawal agreement itself.”