Why victory is within Mrs May’s grasp

PICTURE the scene: it’s late evening on Tuesday, March 12, and BBC News at 10 is reporting live from Parliament where MPs are voting on Theresa May’s make-or-break EU withdrawal deal.

Bong! Newsreader Huw Edwards reports that arch-Brexiteers Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson have just been spotted marching arm-in-arm into the Aye Lobby to vote with Mrs May.

Bong! Political editor Laura Kuenssberg reveals from Central Lobby that up to 20 Labour rebels have defied Labour whips to vote with the Tories.

Bong! A setback for the Prime Minister! Now Kuenssberg is reporting that a phalanx of Conservative hardliners, led by mutinous Tory ex- cabinet minister Esther McVey, is holding out against Theresa May’s deal.

Kuenssberg believes the mutineers have the numbers to sink the Government.

Bong! But now comes news that the Democratic Unionist Party has just won a promise of a huge new development grant for Northern Ireland — and in a last-minute change of mind will now be voting with the Tories, too.

There follows several minutes of desperate tension as Parliamentary tellers for both sides line up to announce the final result. Britain’s future inside the European Union and Theresa May’s survival as Prime Minister is hanging in the balance . . .

The minutes tick by and then, finally, Speaker Bercow announces that the Government has won — by a single vote.

Uproar follows in the Commons. Chaos and confusion. Chancellor Philip Hammond and Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt lean across to shake Mrs May by the hand as she slumps back exhausted on her seat on the green benches and briefly closes her eyes.

A famous Commons victory for a woman who has been written off again and again. A woman who, just six weeks ago, suffered the humiliation of a record defeat of her deal by 230 votes.

Then, live on camera, a note is passed to the PM. Sterling has soared by five cents in the minute that has passed since the result was made known.

Suddenly Mrs May, a dead woman walking for so long, looks like the great survivor.

An impossible fantasy? Maybe — but I don’t think so.

Over the past two weeks, largely unnoticed, events have been moving quietly in the PM’s favour.

Yes, at first sight, last Monday’s Cabinet revolt looked like another disaster for her when Work And Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd, Justice Secretary David Gauke and Business Secretary Greg Clark, among others, laid down an ultimatum to Downing Street.

They threatened to walk out of the Cabinet unless Theresa May ruled out a No Deal Brexit.

It looked like an act of treachery, and perhaps technically it was. But the short-term effect was to terrify the hard- line Tory Brexiteers.

They suddenly woke up to the fact that, if they press on with their own campaign for No Deal, they might get no Brexit at all.

Within days, Jacob Rees-Mogg was watering down his demands over what was once the deal breaker, the Northern Irish backstop.

Meanwhile, a similar dynamic was driving forward events in the Labour Party. The defection of eight MPs to form an embryonic new political party forced Jeremy Corbyn to change policy and support a second referendum on our EU membership to stop further losses from his riven Party.

But there’s an irony here. The likelier that another EU referendum becomes, the more likely that the Brexiteers will back Mrs May’s deal.

Right now, there is one man holding the key to our exit from the EU. He is Attorney General Geoffrey Cox, who first came to wider public attention with a barnstorming speech at the Tory Party conference last year.

COx has been given the task of ensuring that the make-or-break legal judgment — whether any undertaking given by Europe that the Irish backstop will be enforced only for a limited period — is legally binding.

Tory Brexiteers demand nothing less. It is the minimum concession they need in order to vote for Mrs May.

There is an uncanny parallel here with the last great crisis in modern British history: Parliament’s decision to commit forces to war in Iraq. Then, again, it was the Attorney General who held the key to the decision to go to war.

Had Lord Goldsmith — who occupied that position in 2003 — declared that the war was illegal, Tony Blair would have been forced to back down.

As we know all too well, Lord Goldsmith issued a judgment that British troops could be sent to Iraq. Only later did we learn that he had succumbed to massive pressure from Blair, and the war was in reality illegal.

I believe that MPs have much greater faith in the integrity of Geoffrey Cox than they ever did in Peter Goldsmith.

Cox has said privately that if there is, in his view, no legally binding pledge on the backstop, he will make it plain.

So there are still obstacles to be navigated. But with ten days to go, Theresa May has, I believe, at the very least a fighting chance of making it into the winner’s enclosure.

And if she does, we can forget the gossip now circulating in Westminster that the PM will immediately resign.

History will judge whether Brexit has — or has not — been a good thing for Britain. But Mrs May will have delivered on her promise. She will be the heroine of the hour.