Theresa May warns Tories that French president Emmanuel Macron thinks he can stop Brexit

Theresa May has reportedly warned senior Tories that French president Emmanuel Macron believes he can stop Brexit altogether.

According to The Times, the Prime Minister told her Cabinet that Macron thinks a second referendum will call time on Britain’s upcoming departure from the EU.

Senior Government figures told the paper that the French leader has misread support for another referendum in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

They say that because of this, the EU will offer a deal that Mrs May cannot accept – but that Brits would vote for no deal to punish European leaders.

The reports on President Macron’s plans gained traction this week after France warned that it would prefer Britain to crash out of Europe without a deal than accept compromises that harmed the EU.

Nathalie Loiseau, France’s Europe minister, said: ‘No deal would be better than a bad deal.’

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She added that ‘time is running out’ for the Prime Minister to strike a deal with Brussels.

Mrs May did not explicitly mention Chequers during her Conservative Party Conference speech on Wednesday and now a leading Tory Brexiteer has issued a new warning to her that she faces a Commons defeat if she presses ahead with her blueprint for Brexit.

Just hours after the Prime Minister appealed to the party to unite behind her plan, former Brexit minister Steve Baker, who quit over Chequers, urged her to avoid a political ‘accident’ and rethink her approach to negotiations with Brussels.

Mr Baker, a leading member of the pro-Brexit Tory European Research Group, said even if only half the 80 Conservative MPs who had indicated their opposition to the plan actually voted against it would be enough to defeat the Government.

In her closing address to the Conservative conference on Wednesday, Mrs May sought to rally her warring party with an appeal to back her proposed deal in the ‘national interest’.

She warned that if Tory MPs split in pursuing their ‘perfect Brexit’ they risked ending up with ‘no Brexit at all’.

However Mr Baker – who backed former foreign secretary Boris Johnson’s conference call to ‘chuck Chequers’ – said she would face a ‘substantial’ revolt unless she changed course.

He told ITV’s Peston show: ‘Voting against a Chequers-based deal would be quite a high bar, I am not going to deny that. But what I am saying is that even if the whips did fantastically well and got the numbers down to 40 it still seems to me that it will be voted down.

‘I am trying very hard to avoid that by being very plain with everybody on the record what I expect to happen if a Chequers-based deal comes back.’