Conservatives react angrily to defeat of May's Brexit plan

Theresa May is set to face intense pressure from remain-minded Conservative MPs to finally face down hardline Brexiters in her party after a planned restatement of a departure strategy agreed two weeks ago by the Commons was defeated.

Abstentions by MPs from the pro-Brexit European Research Group (ERG) played a big part in seeing the government motion voted down after the Brexit secretary, Stephen Barclay, was unable to persuade them it did not take a no-deal departure off the table.

While May loyalists scrambled to play down the importance of the vote, privately MPs and even some ministers were furious at the ERG and insistent the prime minister had to change course in the coming days.

“There is a degree of wishful thinking going on that the EU can ever do enough to satisfy the Brexit extremists,” one minister said.

“She wants to try to square the circle and it’s just not looking likely. She has a choice: seek the agreement across the House or the country will be out without a deal. They don’t compromise, they never have.”

Ahead of another promised government Brexit motion at the end of the month, a number of ministers are known to be considering voting for amendments that could meaningfully stop no deal or extend article 50, such as one proposed previously by Yvette Cooper.

“[May] is worried about splitting the party but the party could split either way,” the minister said. “She should be worried about our side of the party. In parliament there is nowhere else for the ERG to go but there is potentially somewhere else for the remain wing to go, we are more likely to trigger a realignment.”

A cabinet source said: “Once again the ERG have made life hell for the prime minister and put their own fantasies in the way of pragmatic politics.”

One former minister said the “fake consensus” in the party around the Brady amendment had been exposed by Wednesday night’s vote. “It was never going to last. She has to pick. Either she’s serious about doing a no deal if necessary, in which case she’s a Ukip prime minister, and keeps the ERG onside but fractures the rest of the party, or she rules it out and she’s a Conservative PM but loses the ERG. At the moment she’s nowhere and pleasing no one. It’s about choices. And she won’t make one.”

Others were as outspoken in public. After the defeat Nick Boles, the Grantham MP who has been central to efforts to prevent no deal, tweeted: “Maybe, just maybe, the penny will now drop with prime minister and her chief whip that the hardliners in the ERG want a no-deal Brexit and will stop at nothing to get it.”

Tory MP Heidi Allen said it was clear the Eurosceptics were now intending to force a no-deal Brexit. “The ERG, as many of us have been saying to the prime minister for well over a year now, are in control and always have been,” she said.

“Their game plan has been unwavering from the beginning in its determination to achieve no deal. Parliament must be given the opportunity to take control of the process and try and coalesce around a softer Brexit position. If this is not possible, as is highly likely, we must put the question back to the public.”

Anna Soubry, an anti-Brexit Tory MP, said she was “absolutely delighted” the government agreed to release details of cabinet briefings on the consequences of no deal, meaning she could withdraw her amendment seeking this.

But Soubry told the BBC: “What an absolute fiasco this is. It’s a lack of leadership in both of our broken parties, and frankly we need a different, better way of doing politics in this country, and we need it now.”

Brexiter Tories blamed the defeat on what one, Bernard Jenkin, called “the government’s clumsiness”.

Steve Baker, deputy chair of the ERG, used a point of order after the vote result to urge May to devote her efforts to pushing the so-called Malthouse compromise, a plan drawn up by a series of Conservative MPs to circumvent the controversial Irish border backstop through as-yet-unknown technology to avoid customs checks.

James Cleverly, a Conservative party vice-chair and a key May loyalist, insisted that MPs and the EU should read “not very much” into the vote.

“The more significant votes were the votes we had last month which showed that the House didn’t agree with the first draft of the withdrawal agreement, made the point that the backstop was where the difficulty lay, and that if she were able to make amendments around the backstop, that would be something that would probably command a majority,” he told the BBC.

The complex and precarious choreography for the government was obvious from the start of the opening speech in the debate, by Barclay.

While the mass of Tory MPs were happy with the main element of the motion – tasking May with seeking a revised departure deal – the other amendment passed a fortnight ago, which sought to rule out no deal, was worrying Brexiters.

In what seemed like a planned move, Barclay’s predecessor as Brexit secretary, David Davis, intervened in the speech to seek reassurance Brexit would happen on 29 March, whatever the circumstances. Barclay said he was “very happy” to do that.

While this was intended to mollify the ERG it prompted angry interventions from other Conservatives, including Caroline Spelman, whose amendment two weeks ago had sought to stop no deal. It would be “contemptuous of this house” if Barclay sought to erase the vote for her amendment, Spelman said.

Justine Greening, the former education secretary, also raised her concerns: “The reality is that the vote against no deal in this house was more convincingly passed, including with cross-party support, than the vote to have the prime minister go back and negotiate on alternative arrangements. The government can’t simply just pick and choose which votes it wants to support.”