Robert Peston Robert Peston

A no-deal Brexit or general election are now likelier than ever

Maybe I am simply in the thrall of the powerful emotions manifested by MPs in their debate on Friday, but their rejection of the Withdrawal Agreement just now feels the most significant event to date on the long and tortuous road to Brexit or revocation.

Because the EU just a week ago bent its rules to accommodate the Prime Minister’s request for a modest Brexit delay, and also tried to make it easier for her to ratify the deal by saying only the divorce part – the Withdrawal Agreement – would need MPs’ approval to secure a postponed Brexit date of May 22 for leaving the EU. Parliament has thrown the compromise offered by the EU’s 27 leaders back in their faces. That is why the president of the EU commission Jean-Claude Juncker and its Chief Negotiator Michel Barnier have just said that “a no-deal scenario on April 12 is a likely scenario”, for which the EU is “fully prepared”.

Lots of MPs see that as posturing, somehow an attempt by the EU to bully the UK into accepting a long Brexit delay or no Brexit at all. That is wrong, and perhaps dangerously so; the EU’s 27 leaders want to be liberated from what they feel as the cancerous Brexit uncertainties, that make it impossible for them to rehabilitate their cherished project, and crystallising no-deal is for them a decreasingly scary way of doing that.

As for the Prime Minister, she described “the implications” of this third humiliating rejection of her painstakingly negotiated plan as “very grave” – and she also said that “I fear we are reaching the limits of this process in this House”. Well, on Monday MPs will hold round two of the Letwin process of trying to find a route through this mess that would be supported by a majority of MPs.

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