ONE BY ONE, TRAITORS PUT THE KNIFE INTO THERESA
The private weekly meeting of the arch-Brexiteers’ european Reform Group usually struggles to attract more than 25 MPs and peers. But Tuesday night was different – it was crowded to the rafters.
It was not because everyone had suddenly demanded more detailed discussions on the latest stage of the Government’s complex Brexit negotiations.
The reason was that the group had been told in advance to arrive early and in strength, because a BBC camera crew would be filming the first part of the proceedings for a TV documentary on our departure from the eU.
One MP said: ‘I looked around and saw people who hadn’t been at an eRG meeting for weeks. Some of my colleagues will do anything to be on the TV.’
The familiar figure of Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC political editor, was at the back of the room for the first five minutes of the gathering.
During that time, as the cameras were whirring, there wasn’t a hint of what was to come. It was all sweetness and light as the MPs and peers talked about their hopes and aspirations for Britain after leaving the eU.
To the obvious disappointment of the film crew there was not even a single disobliging comment about Theresa May or her much vaunted Chequers compromise plan. The criticism would come when the cameras were no longer there.
After five minutes the BBC was asked to leave. It did not take long for the mood to become ugly about the Prime Minister.
Usually, Jacob Rees-Mogg, nicknamed the MP for the 18th century because of the way he radiates old-school courtesy and charm, chairs the meetings. he has a firm rule: the eRG discusses policy detail and personal criticism of the Prime Minister is never permitted.
But Mr Rees-Mogg had a pressing alternative engagement. A group from the Class War action group had gone to his £4.5million home in the shadow of the Palace of Westminster to mount a protest, hurling vile verbal attacks at his family.
Understandably, the MP decided he could not attend the eRG meeting under such circumstances and, in his absence, the meeting was chaired by Steve Baker – who quit as a minister when his boss the Brexit Secretary David Davis left the Cabinet in July in protest at the Chequers compromise deal.
The door had barely closed behind the BBC crew before Anne Marie Morris, the MP for Newton Abbot since 2010, shredded the negotiating position of the Prime Minister. ‘This has gone on too long,’ she said. ‘When is the exit date?’
The mood darkened further when Andrew Bridgen, a long-standing critic of the eU and Mrs May, invoked images of the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War of the 1850s – a senseless slaughter immortalised in Tennyson’s poem about ‘the valley of death’.
By drawing parallels between Mrs May’s approach to Brexit and this national catastrophe caused by incompetent leadership, Bridgen could not have made his feelings more apparent.
‘The thought of Theresa May carrying on fills me with dread,’ he said, according to MPs present. ‘It’s like telling a surviving member of the Charge of the Light Brigade, who knows what’s in store, to go back and make another heroic charge into the valley of death knowing this time they won’t get back.’
Andrea Jenkyns, who defeated Labour’s ed Balls in Morley and Outwood in 2015, repeated her call for Mrs May to stand down or be replaced, a sentiment endorsed by Rochford and Southend east MP James Duddridge who said the Chequers plan was not one his constituents voted for. One unnamed MP said: ‘everyone I know says she’s a disaster. She’s got to go.’ Ominously, not one single MP, of the 30 or so who spoke, defended the PM. Whether by accident or design, the meeting took place in the Thatcher Room in the Commons. With a portrait of Lady Thatcher – Britain’s first woman prime minister and no fan of the eU – gazing down on them, MPs demanded a timetable for the departure of Britain’s second woman Prime Minister.
ANO-CONfIDeNCe debate over Mrs May’s premiership – almost certainly resulting in a leadership election – would be triggered if 48 MPs, or 15 per cent of the parliamentary party, write private letters to Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 committee of Tory MPs. Some have already been lodged, but only he knows how many.
Despite the noises off in the Thatcher Room, supporters of Mrs May will be relieved that some of the biggest cats in the Tory Brexit jungle were conspicuously absent. There was no Boris Johnson – he currently has other issues to contend with. No David Davis or Iain Duncan Smith – he was ousted as leader in 2003 and would not be associated with any public plot to undermine another one.
Downing Street insists that Mrs May will see off any challenge. even if a no-confidence motion is tabled, they say, her critics will have to win the support of up to 158 MPs to be certain of ousting her.
After the meeting broke-up some of the MPs went to a dinner at 10 Downing Street, part of an attempt by Mrs May to try to win them over to her Chequers plan.
Downing Street chief of staff and arch Remainer Gavin Barwell fielded MPs’ questions but Mrs May never even stuck her head around the door to say hello.
One MP said: ‘It might have helped if they had at least sent a senior Cabinet minister to talk to us. But at least the food was good.’