The government’s defeat in the House of Commons last night amounts to a ‘bitter humiliation’ for ministers, says the Sun. It is also ‘a moment of shame for the Tory “rebels”’. In defeating the government, the Tory MPs who sided with the opposition ‘utterly compromised’ Theresa May as she heads to Brussels today. As well as making life difficult for the Prime Minister, they have also ‘handed a victory’ to those who want to reverse Brexit, says the Sun. Now the onus is on the PM to ‘find a solution’ to the challenge of negotiating a deal ‘without fearing Remainers in Parliament will kill it’. But May’s hands are tied given that yesterday’s vote now effectively means that Brussels is negotiating, not with the government, but ‘the warring factions of our Parliament’. Such a situation is an ‘impossible farce’, and while some Remainers ‘dressed this up as a battle for democracy’ it is nothing of the sort, says the Sun. Instead, the majority of those who sided against the government wanted to ‘delay or halt Brexit or, failing that, “soften” it to meaninglessness’. The Sun concludes with a question to the Tory rebels: ‘how can the Government negotiate…with any focus now, while living in fear of more Remainer rebellions back home?’.
Theresa May has already promised Parliament a meaningful vote on Brexit. Yet ‘despite this’, says the Daily Telegraph, the government’s defeat last night means that a pledge to hold a ‘a meaningful vote’ will now be included as an amendment on the government’s EU withdrawal bill. On paper, the difference between these two positions looks small, says the Telegraph, detailing how the rebels were concerned that the government would, without last night’s amendment, be able to use secondary legislation to push through its Brexit deal. But ‘in truth, the detail mattered less than the politics’, says the Telegraph, which argues that ‘this was a high-stakes shoot-out in which Mrs May tried to face down the Remainer rebels’. ‘The gamble failed’, says the Telegraph. So what now? ‘The unfortunate legacy is a well of bitterness in the party’, according to the paper, which says the vote is likely to put ’an end to the uneasy truce between the two sides’ within Parliament. Ken Clarke aside, none of those who sided with Labour last night have voted against the government on Brexit before. But now that has changed and the so-called ‘Brexit Mutineers’ are, according to some Brexit supporters, out to stop Britain leaving the EU. Whether this is true or not they are ‘now out in the open, but blame Government obduracy for placing them in this position’. ‘Confronting them was always a risky strategy for Mrs May’, says the Telegraph. On this occasion, it hasn’t worked.
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