Time to turn away from Brexit danger

THERESA May and her new Brexit Secretary, Dominic Raab, will have to forge a relationship of trust and a shared strategy for the negotiations against speculation that the PM’s days could be numbered.

The Prime Minister staged an experiment in giving arch-Brexiteers David Davis and Boris Johnson key roles at the heart of her Cabinet but this exercise in consensus-building crumbled not long after ministers had supposedly signed up to a plan for Britain’s exit from the EU.

Mr Raab has strong pro-Brexit credentials, but by accepting the Cabinet position he has signalled he is prepared to work for Mrs May’s goal of a free market for goods.

Mr Davis and Mr Johnson may be feeling dazed by recent events and angry that the PM’s vision for Brexit does not match theirs. Fellow Brexiteers may urge them to try to unseat the PM and establish a cleaner break with the EU.

Self-preservation and selfadvancement are instincts that run strong among MPs of all parties in Westminster, but this is not the time for an ego-driven exercise in ideological warfare when the prosperity of a country of four nations is at stake.

Just as MPs should have heeded Airbus’ warning that a “no deal” Brexit would be “catastrophic”, so they should pay attention to chief executive Tom Enders’ observation that the UK is now moving in the “right direction”.

It can be argued that the UK has been pitifully slow to move towards a Brexit that will do the least harm to jobs; equally, the case can be made that the PM should go much further to ensure that a free trade in services and not just goods is secured.

But the livelihoods of families across Wales, a nation where our farming and manufacturing sectors are kept afloat through exports to the EU, are endangered by the threat of a hard Brexit and we need to get this notion off the table without delay.

It is democratically problematic for an issue of such enormity to be determined by the internal politics of one party, but this only intensifies the responsibility of individual Conservative MPs to demonstrate that acting to protect jobs is in no way a betrayal of the 2016 referendum but an exercise in courageous leadership.

At this time when fears are rife that the country could be driven off the cliff, this is not the time for a fight over the steering-wheel but to turn away from the edge.