The European Union has reportedly offered April Fools’ Day 2020 as a new Brexit date should Theresa May’s deal fail to succeed on a mooted third attempt to get it through Parliament, assuming Remain MPs move to stop a No Deal on exit on April 12th.
Brexit was originally scheduled to take place on Friday, March 29th, with or without a deal, but the Prime Minister has now delayed it in concert with the European Council — despite promising she would not do so 108 times, and her own MPs and party National Convention voting against it — so it will either take place on May 22nd if her deal is approved by Parliament, or April 12th on No Deal terms if it is not.
It is widely expected that the Remainer-dominated House of Commons will not allow No Deal to take place on April 12th whatever happens to the deal, however, and reports indicate that should they seek a long extension of the Article 50 negotiating period to find a new way forward — likely via a second referendum or a general election acting as a proxy for one — the EU will offer April Fools’ Day 2020 as the new deadline.
The situation in Parliament is developing rapidly, but at present it looks as though Mrs May will attempt to hold a thinly disguised third so-called “meaningful vote” on her deal tomorrow, as downhearted Brexiteers who have previously denounced it and even sacrificed ministerial positions to attack it say they will now back it, provided she resigns once the deed is done.
One of these is the former Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary, Boris Johnson, although in a House of Commons where the Tory party does not command an outright majority on its own even his defection seems unlikely to get Mrs May over the line.
“It’s dead anyway,” the two-time Mayor of London, who remains a potential leadership favourite among Tory activists, if not parliamentary colleagues, is said to have told friends.
Northern Ireland’s Brexit-supporting Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), true to their reputation as gritty negotiators, have already made it clear they will still not back the deal — potentially a mortal blow to its prospects, given it is only with the DUP’s help that the Tories can command a slim parliamentary majority.
And, despite Johnson and other leading Tory Brexiteers such as Jacob Rees-Mogg having said he will now back the deal for what he believes to be pragmatic reasons, rather than any real enthusiasm, a hard core of European Research Group (ERG) members who have become known as “The Spartans” have said they will never back it.
“I told my whip the other day I wouldn’t vote for it if they put a shotgun in my mouth,” the group’s characteristically pugnacious vice chairman, Mark Francois MP, told the BBC defiantly.
Steve Baker MP, the straight-laced former Brexit minister, who has been more forthcoming than any of the Brexiteer MPs who have resigned from Mrs May’s government about the way she and the bureaucrats assisting her have deliberately sabotaged the Brexit negotiations — in a manner he described as an abuse of the constitution — was if anything even more pugnacious.
“What is our liberty for if not to govern ourselves?” Baker demanded in an impassioned speech at an ERG meeting.
“I could tear this place down and bulldoze it into the river,” he said of the Houses of Parliament.
“These fools and knaves and cowards are voting on things they don’t even understand.”
“We’ve been put in this place by people whose addiction to power without responsibility has led them to put the choice of No Brexit or this deal,” he railed.
“I may yet resign the whip [as a Tory MP] than be part of this.”