At yesterday’s 8.30am meeting of senior Downing Street strategists, the mood could hardly have been bleaker.
Theresa May was, according to one ally, ‘staring down the barrel of a gun’.
The Prime Minister had promised to come back to the Commons with a new deal for MPs to vote on today.
But over the weekend, the talks had failed. The PM’s plane had sat on the runway at Northolt, fuelled and ready to go, but there was nowhere to fly to and nothing to sign off.
The PM was in a bind. She could hardly present to MPs the exact same withdrawal agreement which was voted down by a historic margin of 230 votes less than a month earlier. That would be a humiliation. But she had promised a meaningful vote, and pulling it would spark uproar.
4.15pm - Prime Minister Theresa May looking glum shortly before she gives a reading at the Commonwealth Service at Westminster Abbey, London
Mrs May had also promised – after a rebellion by Remainer ministers – two further votes, one on leaving without a deal and another on extending Article 50. However MPs were whipped, these votes were guaranteed to plunge the Tory party into a new and brutal civil war.
There was chatter among MPs that Mrs May could even call a general election to avoid the votes. With nothing to say, No 10 imposed a ministerial media blackout. Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay entered Downing Street just after 10am and was there for nearly two hours, apparently working on a statement due to be made to Parliament in the afternoon.
At the morning briefing of lobby journalists, Downing Street confirmed the meaningful vote would be going ahead, but could not say what the vote would be on.
5.50pm - Downing Street staff cross the tarmac with Mrs May to a plane at RAF Northolt to fly to Strasbourg for last minute talks with EU leaders ahead of the crucial Brexit withdrawal vote in Parliament later today
It was clear the talks were in trouble last week, when Geoffrey Cox, the Attorney General, returned from Brussels empty-handed. But over the weekend, negotiations continued.
By Sunday they were ‘sick of the sight of each other’ one source said, and any hope of a breakthrough appeared to have disappeared.
Yet at one point they were clearly close. EU ambassadors were told yesterday that Mrs May had suggested the additional legal assurances being offered over the Irish border backstop were good enough.
8.20pm - Mrs May brightens up as she is greeted by Jean-Claude Juncker alongside Michel Barnier at the European Parliament building in Strasbourg yesterday evening
But they did not satisfy Mr Cox. In an interview in a Sunday newspaper – conducted earlier in the week – he had made clear he would not rewrite his legal advice unless he was absolutely convinced the new deal meant the UK could not be trapped in the Northern Ireland backstop.
‘I will not change my opinion unless we have a text that shows the risk has been eliminated. I would not put my name to anything less.’
‘I have been a barrister for 36 years, and a senior politician for seven months,’ he insisted. ‘My professional reputation is far more important to me than my reputation as a politician.’
On Sunday
