Junior minister resigns amid talk of challenge to May

A junior minister has resigned over the government’s planned Brexit deal, marking the start of a potentially treacherous day for Theresa May in which she must present the plan to parliament amid talk of more exits and a possible challenge to her leadership.

Shailesh Vara, a minister in the Northern Ireland office, tweeted a resignation letter saying the plan May pushed through cabinet in a marathon meeting on Wednesday would “leave the UK in a halfway house with no time limit on when we will finally become a sovereign nation”.

Vara, the North West Cambridgeshire MP who backed remain in the 2016 referendum, said he feared the UK would stay in limbo for years while a permanent deal with the EU was negotiated.

“We will be locked in a customs arrangement indefinitely, bound by rules determined by the EU over which we will have no say,” he wrote. “Worse, we will not be free to leave the customs arrangement unilaterally if we wish to do so.”

Vara concluded: “We are a proud nation, and it is a sad day when we are reduced to obeying rules made by other countries who have shown that they do not have our best interests at heart. We can and must do better than this.”

The resignation came as the health secretary, Matt Hancock, was sent out to argue that while the deal led to dissent in the cabinet meeting, it had now been agreed to, and was the only plan on offer.

But the shadow Brexit secretary, Keir Starmer, called the plan “a miserable failure of negotiation”, and said Labour would vote against it.

May is due to spend up to three hours on Thursday morning presenting the plan to a likely hostile parliament. There are reports that dissatisfaction among some of her MPs is so strong that enough could send letters of no confidence to reach the figure of 48 needed for a leadership challenge.

She is also braced for the possibility of more ministers resigning in the coming days, potentially some from the cabinet.

On BBC1’s Breakfast, Hancock urged critics to back the deal, saying they must “look at what the alternatives are”.

He said: “This is a good deal, in the best interests of the country. There’s only really two alternatives. One is leaving with no deal, which is not good at all, and the other is having another referendum and potentially no Brexit, and I think that would be hugely divisive, without being decisive.”

Hancock declined to confirm reports that a significant minority of the 29 ministers at the five-hour discussion expressed doubts about May’s plan, after cabinet sources said several people, notably the work and pensions secretary, Esther McVey, spoke strongly against it.

“The nature of cabinet government is that you are frank in private and then once the agreement is reached everybody backs the agreement or else you don’t stay. That’s how it works,” Hancock said. “It was a civil discussion; if you’re a fan of cabinet government as a way of running the country, then it was a thing to behold.”

Ministers were “bringing their different views to bear”, Hancock said, but agreed to sign up to the 500-page document.

He added: “The reason we did that is because, although in any negotiated settlement there are compromises, and there are things that aren’t perfect for each individual, you’ve got to look at the deal in the round, the hundreds of pages of it, and this deal delivers on the result of the referendum.”

Insisting that there was a good chance the deal could pass through parliament, something critics say is unlikely, Hancock said it counted as a good plan.

He said: “What people watching this morning can know from this deal is that we deliver on the result of the referendum, we make sure that we take back control of our money, our laws and make sure that we end free movement of people, yet we maintain a high-quality trading relationship, which is why so many businesses have backed it. For a couple of years of negotiation that is a good outcome.”

But Starmer was scathing. He told Sky News: “We’ve said that we would judge the deal when we saw it. We’ve now seen it, we’ve read and analysed 500 or so pages. It’s a miserable failure of negotiation.

“There’s huge detail on issues like the backstop, which the government says it doesn’t intend to use. And then on the question of what is it we intend to use, the future relationship, the million-dollar question, there’s seven pages.

“So this is an invitation for people to sign up to something with no idea where they are heading.What we are heading for is something that will make trade more difficult, rather than easier. That must be the first time in history that we have a proposed trade agreement to make trade harder, not easier.”