Brexit in a spin

‘The numbers just don’t stack up,’ one cabinet minister wearily declared to me on Monday night. This is, perhaps, the single most important fact in British politics today: Theresa May does not currently have the votes to pass her Brexit plan even if she could get the European Union to accept it.

Boris Johnson and David Davis’s resignations mean that it won’t just be Jacob Rees-Mogg and a dozen ultras voting against Theresa May’s Brexit deal, but a far larger group. Further proof of this came on Tuesday, when two of the party’s vice-chairs — Ben Bradley and Maria Caulfield — resigned so that they could oppose the deal. Tellingly, neither one would have been on anyone’s list of Brexit obsessives. When I asked a Remain–voting cabinet minister where things will now end up, he predicted that there would be ‘60-odd voting against’ Mrs May’s compromise, ‘and you can’t make up for that with pragmatic Labour MPs’.

Boris Johnson’s resignation letter was free of classical analogies. But one would have been appropriate. For what Mrs May appears to have won is a Pyrrhic victory. She has got the cabinet to agree a common position that looks like it will open the door to negotiations with the EU. But the price she has paid for this success will result in so many Tory MPs voting against the deal that it is difficult to see how it can pass.

Part of the problem for Mrs May is that many Tory Eurosceptics think that if her deal is defeated, Britain will simply default to leaving the EU without a deal. They see the choice as being between Mrs May’s deal and leaving without a deal and trading on World Trade Organisation terms. Indeed, one of the things that led to Boris Johnson’s resignation was his conclusion that no deal would actually be preferable to the Chequers plan.