A dedicated band of Conservative pro-Brexit holdouts stands ready to perish rather than let May’s deal pass.
Plus: The Chief Whip’s swift transformation from Francis Urquhart to Mr Bean. And: why I can’t bring myself to vote Tory in the local elections.
Gove and Davis followed the Prime Minister, but they were heavily outnumbered in the Parliamentary Conservative Party. The Chief Whip abstained.
I voted for the Prime Minister’s deal today. But the Commons didn’t – and we now all need a positive alternative.
Philip Davies, a famously long-standing and committed Brexiteer, is among their number.
“The negotiating strategy has gone wrong, and it has gone wrong largely because the Government has abandoned the one thing you can do, which is to walk away.”
If her revised plan fails, the most likely outcomes are an even softer Brexit or a second referendum.
The logic of his position was that the UK was leaving by March 29th. It hasn’t changed. The Government’s has. So he’s gone.
The words of Gordon Brown to Tony Blair echo in our ears. “There is nothing that you could say to me now that I could ever believe”.
Bower writes him off as a loser, which is perhaps what he will end up being. But he did much better at the last general election than the commentariat expected.
All he may have achieved is to make the No Deal that neither side of the negotiations wants marginally more likely.
I welcome the suggestion that local Associations should follow the lead that the National Convention took last weekend.