Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. Tim Shipman
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attorney general, had drawn up a proposal for a deal and fed it to May via Williamson. It had been changed, but the paper sitting in front of the rebels committed the government to a vote in Parliament. It said, ‘We intend that the vote will cover not only the withdrawal arrangements but also the future relationship with the European Union. Furthermore, I can confirm that the Government will bring forward a motion on the final agreement, to be approved by both Houses of Parliament before it is concluded. We expect and intend that this will happen before the European Parliament debates and votes on the final agreement.’ Morgan read the paragraph and said, ‘The words are fine but they don’t go far enough, they don’t cover the no-deal scenario.’
There was a further discussion. May and her advisers argued that the word ‘agreement’ covered both scenarios, that Britain might agree not to agree with the EU. The prime minister was concerned that she should be able to use the threat of no deal as leverage in negotiations. Giving Parliament an explicit veto would remove that card from her hand. Morgan was not happy; she felt it left too much wiggle room. But Grieve and Burt were satisfied.
In the chamber, David Jones intervened on Keir Starmer to announce the decision and kept reading from his sheet each time he was probed further. In response to one question, Morgan felt he had rowed back slightly on what had been agreed. Downing Street spin doctors were also briefing that they had given no ground, when they obviously had, a modus operandi that was to come back to bite Theresa May during the general election. Morgan was seen in a heated exchange with Williamson at the back of the chamber. She tweeted, ‘Govt did make a concession but for No 10 to then brief there was no change & Minister to undermine it makes no sense.’
In the end, amendment 110 was defeated with a government majority of thirty-three. Burt and Grieve opposed it, Morgan abstained and just seven Tories – including Anna Soubry and Bob Neill – defied their party whip. It was Neill’s first ever vote against his own government. George Osborne, who the chiefs believed was fomenting rebellion by inviting colleagues into his office for private chats (claims he denied), was absent.
Davis got his bill through the Commons with no amendments, but the government still faced a rebellion in the House of Lords, where that old Europhile warrior Michael Heseltine, now eighty-three, had returned to the saddle for one last battle. In a week of drama, the Lords defeated the government on an amendment to guarantee the rights of EU citizens. Five days later, on 7 March, Heseltine led a rebellion of thirteen Conservative peers to pass a second amendment demanding a ‘meaningful’ parliamentary vote on the deal. During the debate – the best attended in the Lords since 1831 – the former deputy prime minister announced that he had been sacked ‘from the five jobs with which I have been helping the government’, including a post promoting regional growth. He insisted, ‘It’s the duty of Parliament to assert its sovereignty in determining the legacy we leave to new generations of young people.’ One senior government source claimed that Heseltine ‘cried’ when he was dismissed. More surprising, perhaps, Heseltine said that when he left the government’s employ he had never yet spoken to Theresa May.
After another week of to-ing and fro-ing, the Commons stripped out the amendments. The Lords backed down on 13 March and the bill received royal assent the following week. For Steve Baker it was a moment of great satisfaction. ‘The thing for me that was joyful about it was that the Eurosceptic movement was actually united and had done something together,’ he said. ‘And it united with the government.’ David Davis said, ‘We are now on the threshold of the most important negotiation for our country in a generation.’
Having voted for Article 50 and backed Brexit, Keir Starmer drew a line in the sand and made clear that Labour would now fight the government over the sort of Brexit they were pursuing. On 27 March, he spelt out six tests that any deal must fulfil. Some, like a ‘fair migration system’, retaining a ‘strong, collaborative relationship with the EU’ and ‘protecting national security’, were uncontroversial. Two of them – ‘delivering for all nations and regions of the UK’ and ‘protecting workers’ rights and employment protections’ – allowed Labour to make Brexit a domestic political issue, defining itself against a ‘Tory Brexit’. Starmer’s masterstroke was to demand that Britain keep ‘the exact same benefits’ she enjoyed within the single market and the customs union. Cleverly, the wording of this demand was taken from a comment made by David Davis months earlier. It was a stick with which Labour were to beat the Brexit secretary for months. ‘It was a political device to hold them to account,’ a senior Labour Party official said. ‘It set the bar so high for the Tories that we could always disagree with them. Here’s the bar, jump that high.’ Starmer, a super-smooth operator fond of jargon, told colleagues it gave Labour ‘grip’ in the process. ‘I think the phrase “grip” is ridiculous but Jeremy is and most people are more polite than I am,’ one of Corbyn’s aides said. The six tests were a success. When the general election was called, three weeks later, Starmer’s plan meant enough things to enough people that it avoided a damaging split. However, another Labour bigwig was beginning to argue that Brexit could be stopped altogether.
Tony Blair’s quest to transform himself from yesterday’s man into tomorrow’s political visionary – a role in which he had once excelled – took flight on 17 February. In a speech made under the banner of Open Europe, the former prime minister spoke with pseudo-religious intensity of his ‘mission’ to persuade Britons to ‘rise up’ and change their minds on Brexit, calling for ‘a way out from the present rush over the cliff’s edge’. Blair claimed people had voted in the referendum ‘without knowledge of the true terms of Brexit’ and argued that the consequences would be ‘painful’ and the benefits ‘largely illusory’.
Blair suggested that a second referendum was on the cards if the public changed their views. ‘If a significant part of that 52 per cent show real change of mind, however you measure it, we should have the opportunity to reconsider this decision,’ he said. ‘This issue is the single most important decision this country has taken since the Second World War and debate can’t now be shut down about it.’ Privately, he told friends opposition to Brexit would need to be running at 60 per cent for there to be any chance of stopping it.
The Brexiteers dismissed Blair as an out-of-touch elitist. Reworking Blair’s riff, Boris Johnson said, ‘I urge the British people to rise up and turn off the TV next time Blair comes on with his condescending campaign.’ Nigel Farage compared him to a ‘former heavyweight champion coming out of retirement’ who would ‘end up on the canvas’. Yet no one else trying to make the revanchist argument on Brexit succeeded in getting anything like the same coverage.
Blair’s intervention gave new energy to the monthly meetings in his office and gave rise to fresh speculation that he might be about to set up a new political party. Between February and June 2017, senior Labour moderates – both past and serving – would have conversations about how to proceed. Blair told the author that his goal was to stake out a new policy agenda for the political centre, which he felt both main parties had vacated. ‘What I’m doing is putting together a team of people who will try and articulate what a radical centre policy agenda looks like, because I think one of the problems is that both Labour and the Tories are really offering us two competing visions of the sixties.’
Behind the scenes he was a key player in conversations between moderates. A former cabinet minister said, ‘They’ve not decided whether to recapture the leadership of the Labour Party or create some new movement. Tony’s up for both. He’s very involved, talking to Labour MPs, talking to union leaders’ about turning around Labour. ‘That’s the focus of their efforts. But they accept it may not work and then they’ll have to create a new movement.’
Joe Haines, Harold Wilson’s old spin doctor, suggested that moderates in the Parliamentary Labour Party, at least two-thirds of the PLP, should make a universal declaration of independence and sit as a new grouping, electing their own leader to supplant Corbyn as leader of the opposition. There was talk of Dan Jarvis, a former major in the Parachute Regiment who was MP for Barnsley Central, emerging as the front man. Blair, friends said, tried ‘frequently’ to persuade David Miliband, a former foreign secretary, to return from New York, where he was running the charity International Rescue Committee. Miliband had warned in September 2016 that Labour