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Theresa May said in the Commons that if MPs voted on 12 March against her draft withdrawal agreement with the EU, they would be able to vote on 13 March on whether to leave the EU on 29 March without a deal and, if that was not supported, could then vote on whether to ask the EU to agree to an extension of negotiations under Article 50. Three cabinet ministers, Greg Clark, Amber Rudd and David Gauke, had earlier said they would defy government policy in order to vote for a delay; they were called ‘kamikaze cabinet ministers’ during a heated cabinet meeting. Mrs May had returned from an EU-Arab League summit at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, where Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, had said that ‘an extension would be a rational solution’. Mark Rutte, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, said to Britain at the same summit: ‘Wake up. This is real. Come to a conclusion and close the deal.’ In the meantime, MPs backed rival responses to the Brexit impasse. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, said that if his party could not get its own version of Brexit accepted in the Commons, it would promise another referendum. A record temperature for February of 21.2C (70.16F) was registered at Kew Gardens.
Ian Austin became the ninth MP to leave the Labour party, blaming Jeremy Corbyn for ‘creating a culture of extremism and intolerance’, but he declined to join the Independent Group of eight former Labour and three former Conservative MPs. Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, said: ‘If our new independent splitters have got the guts to have by-elections, we will crush them.’ But Tom Watson, the party’s deputy leader, convened a group of social-democratically minded MPs.
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