Charge of the Right Brigade? Theresa May’s last roll of the dice looks doomed

The European Parliament elections to be held tomorrow with the results to be announced on Sunday may prove a pivotal moment in the Brexit saga. The Conservative Party is braced for a record defeat, largely at the hands of The Brexit Party. Labour are nervous that they may be run close by the Liberal Democrats. The Greens have a fighting chance of doing well. Change UK may fall well short.
The element that is hardest to anticipate is turnout. Back in the 1990s, when these elections were last held by themselves and not tied to local council ballots in an attempt to rev up turnout, fewer than one in four theoretical electors actually turned up to a polling station. The numbers will surely be higher this time but it would be a real surprise if they exceeded 50%. The chances are that it will be those who feel most passionately about the issue of the UK’s membership of the EU – be they for remaining or leaving – who will participate and more mainstream souls will stay at home.
With this impending political storm about to break, it appeared slightly surreal that the Cabinet had a three hour meeting yesterday to discuss the contents of the Withdrawal Agreement Bill (WAB). In a last desperate throw of the dice Theresa May has in effect subsumed both the original meaningful vote notion and the idea of decisive indicative votes into this lengthy piece of legislation.
She has also outlined a number of concessions designed explicitly to soften concerns over the Irish backstop, to strengthen the hand of Parliament during the next stage of the Brexit negotiations (if and when they are ever reached) and has reached out to Labour in terms of employment rights, environmental standards and consumer protection. There is also the prospect that if the House of Commons affords the Bill a Second Reading in the first week of June (although that timing could slip slightly) then MPs would have the chance to approve a temporary Customs Union with the EU or a second referendum.
The Prime Minister and her remaining allies have cast this as a ‘something for everybody’ approach that should appeal to pro-Brexit Conservative MPs and Labour MPs in Leave constituencies alike. It also comes with the de facto pledge that if it makes it through the House of Commons then she will stand down very shortly afterwards. The less open assumption (although a universally held one now) is that if the House of Commons were to reject what would be her fourth attempt at extricating the UK from the EU (a fifth if one counts the original effort abandoned in mid-December) then she quits.
Politics is proving a more unpredictable business in the UK of late that has been true historically. Yet even allowing for this, it looks as if this last roll of the dice is doomed. Indeed, the dice may not roll.
Proceeding with a Second Reading vote if defeat is certain may prompt a Cabinet insurrection
It is far from certain that the Second Reading vote will actually occur at all. Parliament is about to enter a recess that will not end until Tuesday 4 June. A vote could occur shortly after that. If it is obvious by then that Conservative support for it is ebbing away and that not enough Labour MPs are switching sides to cancel them out, then the strong advice of the Whips Office will be not to hold the vote at all.
Defeat would not only expose Conservative divisions (which could hardly be less hidden) but would create a serious procedural complication in that the Speaker would be unlikely to let the Bill come back in basically the same form under a different Prime Minister. That in turn means that the present Parliament would need to be formally prorogued and a Queen’s Speech prepared which would be followed by several days of debate and a formal vote on whether to approve the agenda set out by Her Majesty.
On balance, the Government would probably carry that division but it would need the endorsement of the Democratic Unionist Party, which would come with a price tag upon it. Senior Cabinet ministers would also be concerned that they would be compelled to vote for a Bill which a majority of their own backbenchers might well be posed to vote against, an unfortunate state of affairs for themselves but one which would allow Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab, who are not bound by collective responsibility, to switch back to a pure Brexit stance and court MPs backing.
Hence, if we reach Tuesday 4 June and the WAB looks as politically dead as the proverbial dodo, a Cabinet insurrection at its meeting that morning could force a delay to a vote in the House of Commons and until Donald Trump’s State Visit is done, a mercy killing for the WAB.
The Conservative Party is now desperate for a leadership election
A factor compounding the above is the impending leadership election for the Conservative Party. Mrs May has clung on since Easter in part because none of her more plausible potential successors was sufficiently confident that they would make it through the parliamentary stage of the ballot to move against her. The risk for those individuals is that if they defer further in the hope of clarity as to their prospects, there might be a short-term boom in support for someone else instead. As matters stand, the five figures of Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt, Sajid Javid, Mr Johnson and Mr Raab still look like the pack from which the ultimate two contenders will emerge but that could swiftly change.
Whether or not the WAB obtained a Second Reading would complicate the timing of the election. It could take well into mid-July for the Bill to move on to its committee stage (where amendments of a dramatic character could occur) and then a Third Reading. This would suggest that Mrs May stays on at least until that point with a successor not being in place until September.
Most Conservative MPs (irrespective of their Brexit preferences) think that is way too long and a fresh start is required now. It would be better, therefore, on this line of thinking to reverse the Order of Play and have a battle for the leadership first, starting in mid-June and ending before late July, and then a revised version of the WAB (shorn of a hint of a Customs Union of any kind) thereafter. A new Prime Minister with a different looking Cabinet, a sense of personal mandate and something of a honeymoon period with his or her colleagues might then have a much better chance of passing a WAB than Mrs May does.
In truth, the leadership election has all but started. There could easily be up to 15 names for the first round of voting among Conservative MPs, although the numbers would fall away rapidly after that. Across Whitehall, political life has moved on from partial paralysis to induced coma waiting for it to arrive. The sense is that even if no one has any real idea what the eventual outcome will be, matters cannot be allowed to drift any longer. Brexit is almost playing second fiddle to it.
The default option is not that the UK will leave the EU on 31 October if nothing else happens
The Downing Street ‘strategy’ to make the WAB more attractive to MPs of all stripes is that if it is not enacted then the ‘default option’ would be for the UK to leave the EU on 31 October when the current extension period expires. Indeed, there has been briefing to the effect that Brussels would not contemplate any additional extra time, and even if it were tempted by the idea, Emmanuel Macron would finally snap and rule out the option.
The trouble with this argument is that there are solid reasons not to believe it. A new Prime Minister would have a reasonable chance of securing a WAB before the end of October. Even if they did not manage to do so, there remains a clear majority in the House of Commons which is opposed to any form of no-deal (managed or otherwise), and it has already demonstrated that it is able and willing to seize control of the parliamentary timetable to avoid such an outcome.
If the 31 October deadline were to be missed then the chances are that there would be ‘one last extension’, probably until 30 June 2020, but that explicitly or implicitly it would involve the UK committing itself to either an early election or a second referendum. By then Mrs May will long have been yet another Conservative Party leader eaten alive by the EU question.
Tim Hames
Director General, BVCA