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Leave the mouldy cherries of Theresa May’s Brexit deal... Now feast on battle of Bercow

Michael Gove’s relentlessly upbeat assessment of the Theresa May deal as “a glistening bowl of cherries” woke us up this morning with a paradox. The fruit has proved so untempting, despite months of hawking it around, that the Prime Minister looks set to suffer the heaviest parliamentary defeat of a government on key legislation in decades. Because her deal serves up not enough Brexit to please Leavers and not enough Remaining to please Stayers, Parliament has already moved on to the quest for something else. Like the cherries, it is now consigned to mould.

Along the way, more is changing than an ill-fated plan and a personal nadir for the Prime Minister. An exchange between her and Ed Miliband during a warm-up debate for tonight’s vote brought rare pithiness to the current wordy disputes. The former Labour leader ventured that “the Government is the servant of this House.” May rallied tartly that the Government was “in this issue, the servant of the people”.

Both have a point and neither, in the sense of clinching the argument, can be wholly right. The argument about how to deliver Brexit, water it down or stop it is rapidly becoming one about where power lies in practice — with Number 10 or in the Speaker’s chair.

Critics of John Bercow, the bullish, often tetchy Speaker of the Commons, believe he is overseeing a shift in power away from the executive and towards MPs — a coup deploying amendments, rather than the palace-storming sort. Allowing a controversial amendment to be voted on last week — Dominic Grieve’s plan to force the PM to set out a back-up plan within three days of losing tonight — was a watershed moment but one that could only happen because Tory MPs failed to rally behind May, a poor augury for tonight’s showdown.

Boris Johnson’s jibe at key figures in Parliament’s “take back control” movement as the “deep state” has a splinter of truth. The combination of Grieve, Oliver Letwin and Ken Clarke does remind us of the “deeper magic before the dawn of time” reasserting itself in this political Narnia. This degree of mutiny is symptomatic of May’s failure to win support for her plan after two years of deliberation. Politics in moments of high drama is about where energy lies — and Parliament looks a lot livelier than the Tory front bench.

Anne McElvoy
Anne McElvoy

Talking to senior ministers, I have the impression that they are commenting on a process and weighing up outcomes, rather than identifying themselves with it or its success. Even the PM has given up selling the deal’s benefits and now trades in the cheaper currency of warnings about the danger of Jeremy Corbyn supplanting the Tories in Number 10.

We will see tonight how effective this last-ditch attempt at torsion has been, but the best outlook for May looks like a defeat by a majority of over 100 and the worst one looks like it might be a devastating one of up to twice that.

A likely no-confidence vote will then be tabled, according to Labour sources, by Corbyn, who is sensitive to accusations that he failed to act when May was on the ropes in December. Not for the first time, all this looks more like Japanese Kabuki drama than a serious plan to topple the PM. Even a Corbynite MP sounded unconvinced. “Jeremy has to do something. But when she goes, it will be her Cabinet that does the deed.”

The more decisive battle will rage between the Speaker and No 10, on how far each will shape the next tranche of options to be voted on. Much dramatic irony lurks in this grudge match: May and Bercow are so alike in their vices. Both are prickly, inflexible, touchy and tend towards tone-deafness to the arguments of others.

"Politics in moments of high drama is about where energy lies: Parliament looks livelier than the Tory front bench"

There’s an intriguing role-swap: May made her way to power from the stolid, pragmatic Tory centre and is trying to deliver on a Brexit driven by the Right. Yet the Bercow I first encountered in the late Eighties was an amiable, ferociously Right-wing “Tory Boy” of Eurosceptic bent. As Mike Penning, a yeoman Leaver recalls: “He made Norman Tebbit look a bit Left-wing.”

Since those heady days, Bercow has marched steadily towards the progressive centre, in part driven by ambition to secure Labour votes for the Speaker’s job, a genuflection that irritated many Tories even before his present incarnation. But he is genuinely determined that Parliament should play a key role in shaping the outcome of the Brexit stand-off and, in particular, avoiding no-deal. Still, banking on Parliament “taking back control”, or bringing around a second referendum vote soon is unwise. The same problem that has dogged the executive and divided Cabinet also afflicts the legislature.

The only clear majority likely in Parliament is against leaving the EU without a deal. Mustering majorities against a big, disruptive thing is a lot easier than doing so for something particular, across the party divide, on a question as fraught as this. Currently that applies as much to a bid for a second referendum as to solutions based in membership of the European Economic Area (the Norway option) or any other acronym.

Among themselves, Cabinet members are sounding out positions for a series of “indicative votes” — including a possible extension of Article 50. Again, this looks hard to achieve unless there were a clear route ahead to justify the delay. But working through the options is an option the PM and her proxies have been quietly discussing with Angela Merkel.

A phone call at the weekend was reasonably productive, by the standards of their previously chilly dealings. It did not, as The Sun suggested, herald a change in the proposed Irish backstop. But it did underline the German leader’s concern over the wider implications of Britain crashing out of the EU. Merkel’s finance minister Peter Altmaier took to Twitter noting (in sympathetic terms) that the best plan was to “patiently wait”.

So when the counting is over, Parliament will have its day, or rather days, of tussles over amendments, compromises and Houdini-esque solutions. But the number of Tory MPs who do follow their leader tonight will tell its own story. May has proved a stubbornly hard PM to remove. The more testing question will be what she’s achieving by being there.

  • Anne McElvoy is Senior Editor at The Economist