BREXIT: NOW IT’S GUERILLA WAR

Two more Tories quit with a threat of more to come

THERESA May is facing a relentless ‘guerilla war’ to make her drop her Brexit blueprint. Two senior Tories yesterday became the latest to quit, telling the Prime minister her chequers plan would damage their party and Britain.

A ringleader of the eurosceptic revolt warned of a resignation every day until Parliament goes into recess in a fortnight.

‘This is not going to stop,’ said the source. ‘We want the chequers plan killed, and we want it killed now. This is guerilla war.’

Pro-Brexit mPs are threatening to vote down any final deal based on the proposals.

And they are considering blocking other Government legislation – taking advantage of the fact mrs may has no commons majority.

some ministers are choosing to remain in

Government only ‘ by the skin of their teeth’, according to a Cabinet source.

Donald Trump deepened Mrs May’s Brexit misery yesterday – warning that Britain was in turmoil, and apparently backing Boris Johnson.

Although the Prime Minister appears to have seen off an immediate leadership challenge, Eurosceptics are furious about her Chequers agreement, details of which are due to be published tomorrow. It ties Britain into EU rules on goods and would create a customs partnership.

After the resignations of David Davis, Boris Johnson and three other MPs from Government roles, Ben Bradley and Maria Caulfield yesterday took the number of resignations to seven. In letters to Mrs May, the two Tory vice-chairmen warned that voters would punish the party if Britain stayed close to EU rules. In other developments: Tory MP Andrew Bridgen went public with a letter of no-confidence, accusing Mrs May of trying to ‘dupe’ voters;

Mr Trump declined to endorse the PM, saying it was ‘up to the people’ whether she remained in office;

At the first meeting of her new Cabinet, ministers agreed to step up preparations for a no deal departure from the EU;

No10 remained on edge about the intentions of Mr Johnson, who failed to back Mrs May in his resignation letter;

Infighting broke out between proBrexit Tory MPs in a WhatsApp group, with May backers denounced as ‘sycophants and careerists’. Around 80 Tory members of the European Research Group of Eurosceptic MPs met on Monday to plot how to make Mrs May change course.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, who chairs the group, warned the Prime Minister she might have to rely on Labour votes.

In her letter of resignation, Miss Caulfield warned that Mrs May’s policy ‘may assuage vested interests, but the voters will find out and their representa- tives will be found out’. ‘This policy will be bad for our country and bad for the party,’ said the Lewes MP. ‘ The direct consequences of that will be prime minister Corbyn.’

Mr Bradley said the Chequers plan would wreck opportunities to develop global trade and be ‘an outward-looking nation in control of our own destiny’.

‘Being tied to EU regulations and the EU tying our hands when seeking to make new trade agreements will be the worst of all worlds,’ wrote the Mansfield MP, who voted Remain in a constituency where 70 per cent of voters opted to Leave.

The resignations follow those of Brexit Secretary Mr Davis, his junior minister Steve Baker, Foreign Secretary Mr Johnson and ministerial aides Conor Burns and Chris Green.

Mr Bridgen yesterday became the first Tory MP to make public his letter to the chairman of the party’s backbench 1922 Committee calling for a vote of no-confidence in Mrs May. A leadership ballot will be triggered if 48 letters are received.

The MP for North West Leicestershire claimed Brexit talks had ‘ deteriorated into a state of complete capitulation’.

Earlier in the day, Mrs May was bolstered by the support of senior Brexiteers. International Trade Secretary Liam Fox seen to shake his head and mouth the word ‘ No’ when reporters asked him in Downing Street whether he was about to quit.

Environment Secretary Michael Gove declared he backed the Prime Minister’s plans ‘100 per cent’.

THESE past tempestuous days in British politics have been a calamity at several levels. There has been the loss of office for David Davis and Boris Johnson, who must both feel bruised and angry.

The British Cabinet was demeaned by some Downing Street thug (thought to be Chief Whip Julian Smith) who aggressively told ministers they could damn well order minicabs home from the Prime Minister’s country house, Chequers, if they wished to resign last Friday.

And the national negotiating position has been severely weakened by the numerous concessions so feebly offered by Number 10.

Then there is the position of Theresa May. To say her authority has been dented does not even start to describe the damage she has sustained.

She has been battered like the panels of a jalopy in a stock-car gymkhana. She has behaved in an unprincipled, cowardly, erratic fashion.

How can she ever regain her party’s support?

Yet the political damage goes far beyond any of these significant developments. Something deeper and more dangerous has happened.

The past few days have laid bare a suicidal determination in our political class to ignore the will of the people.

They believe they know better, and so they are shamelessly, yet covertly, trying to overturn the EU referendum’s Leave result. I genuinely think they have lost their marbles.

Betrayed

Party activists and electors, and not just those who supported Leave, will think: ‘Why should we bother to vote in future if our decisions are binned? Why bother with parliamentary politics?’ That is a question our country has not addressed since the 17th century’s brutal Civil War, and it is not an argument we should lightly wish to revisit.

If you think I am exaggerating the public disquiet, listen to Wellingborough’s Tory MP Peter Bone.

On Monday he told the Commons that his long-serving local Tory activists, who for years had gone out doorstepping in all weathers, felt so betrayed by Mrs May that they had gone on strike. Ed Vaizey, a metropolitan Europhile MP sitting behind Mr Bone, shouted ‘rubbish!’ repeatedly. Why? Mr Bone was simply reporting what had happened.

Perhaps Mr Vaizey should have heard stalwart Tory supporters after church at our village in Herefordshire last Sunday. Some were unable to mention Mrs May’s name without swearing — and that was on consecrated ground.

Surrender

Still think I’m over- stating the case, Vaizey? Look at the letters column in the true-blue Daily Telegraph. Since the end of last week, it has throbbed with a rage never previously seen on those genteel pages.

Tory supporters are not naturally troublesome people. They tend to express themselves politely. But ‘timidity’, ‘duplicity’, ‘vacillation’, ‘total surrender’, ‘ appalling’, ‘appeaser’ — these are just some of the words Telegraph letter-writers have flung at vicar’s daughter Mrs May.

Let no one, not even an Ed Vaizey, be in doubt that this issue has achieved ‘ cutthrough’ with the public.

When Mrs May gathered her Cabinet at Chequers last Friday it was still possible to believe that she and her officials would honour their repeated promises to set us free from the draining suction of Brussels.

She was going to liberate us so we could run our own trade, control our own borders, supervise our finances and have our own judicial system and sovereign Parliament.

But by the end of Friday, having held ministers in the political equivalent of a police riot-squad ‘kettling’ operation, she announced that the Government’s position on Brexit had ‘evolved’. Translation: it had capitulated.

Suddenly she wanted soft arrangements on trade and customs which are scarcely different from current EU rules. Suddenly, too, there was talk of a ‘mobility framework’ with the EU. This looks to be another way of saying ‘freedom of movement’.

EU arrangements rejected by 17.4 million voters are slyly being rebadged. But British voters will not be fooled.

What did you make of Mrs May when she became Prime Minister? My word for her in last year’s election was ‘glumbucket’. Yet she at least seemed to be straight.

It worried me that she had been a Remain supporter, Brexit being such an emotional thing, but she seemed to make the right noises about obeying the will of the people.

Even last Wednesday, when she must have known precisely the terms of the ambush she was so disgracefully about to spring on Messrs Davis and Johnson, she assured Parliament she was going to do what the referendum voters had ordered.

I regret to say, she was either lying, or she has a different understanding of the English language from normal people.

Her ‘Brexit means Brexit’ line was exposed as a con, as meaningless as her dreadful ‘strong and stable’ mantra during last year’s General Election.

Yet I urge Brexiteers not to be entirely despondent. We will, at the very least, be leaving the EU in name, and future governments will, therefore, be able to extract us with relative ease now that the EU (Withdrawal) Act is on the statute book.

That Act overturns Ted Heath’s 1972 laws which took us into the Brussels quicksands. Brexit is not a total failure. But it is a great deal less wonderful than it could have been if we had been led by a more visionary PM rather than this limited clunker May.

Former Tory leader Lord Hague wrote yesterday that politics is divided into ‘Romantics’ and ‘Realists’, and that it was the latter who understood that the Chequers compromise was necessary. Lord Hague underplays the political importance of the heart.

Voters want, to quite a large degree, to be seduced by a vision of improvement and to have that sold to them with charm and fervour. Chequers was just flat lemonade. It was defeatist. Hopeless in the literal sense of that word.

Under Mrs May’s premiership, the political headlines are all about Brexit being a problem.

No it isn’t. It could be terrifically exciting. The difficulties arise entirely from the Remainers. And the more they make these problems, the more they will demoralise the public they are supposed to serve.

I write this with a heavy heart for I am a patriotic parliamentarian and, indeed, a believer in elitism. For me, an elite is an essential part of any aspirational society, for it can create a top tier which those on lower strata can aim to join.

Yet an elite must be porous. It must not try to fence off its privileges. That is what our elite, in the law, the BBC, Civil Service, the Confederation of British Industry and elsewhere have been doing.

Horrified by what they see as the ignorance of the pro-Brexit lower orders, they are fighting dirtily to maintain their Brussels career paths, their industrial subsidies and those EU regulations which create oodles of work for them.

Ambushed

Mrs May claims that her Chequers agreement has ‘united’ her team. How can she utter such obvious nonsense?

Chequers has riven Mrs May’s party as blackly as a bolt of lightning splits a country oak. And it has sickened the voters: opinion polls show support for Brexit only increasing. The scheming civil servants may win today’s battles, but they will eventually lose.

I’m afraid even Mrs May’s one-time supporters — or at least the ones I have met and communicated with — are now appalled by her. The more she croaks on about how her policy ‘is not a betrayal’, the more they will think it is.

She has fallen through that swivelling mirror Nick Clegg vanished through when he reneged on Lib Dem promises not to raise university fees. His party was wiped out at the next election.

So will the Tories be unless they can replace her, possibly next year, with someone who is fresh, optimistic, romantically pro-Brexit and, most of all, someone who understands that the elite and its officials are the servants, and the people their masters.