TIME once again is running out.
Last week, Theresa May let it be known that, one way or another, she wanted to wrap up the Brexit talks with Labour by tomorrow. The public, she suggested, were fed up and just wanted to get on with leaving the EU.
Today in a room in Whitehall, David Lidington for the Government and Sir Keir Starmer for Labour will lead their respective teams to try to bridge the gap, which we are often told is not that great, to find a Brexit compromise.
The nub is now the Prime Minister’s apparent final offer: a temporary customs arrangement, lasting until the next General Election in 2022 when the two parties could then campaign for their own separate visions of Brexit beyond that point.
Yet this looks like nothing more than extending the transition period from December 2020 to May 2022 when voters, at what will inevitably become a Brexit General Election, will choose between the Tories’ vision of a customs arrangement and Labour’s of a customs union.
Of course, one of the many groups who will not like this is the Scottish Conservatives as it might suggest UK fishermen having to stay in the hated Common Fisheries Policy until December 2022 ie more than six years after people voted to leave the EU.
A Con-Lab compromise will, of course, have consequences.
A third of the Tory Party will be up in arms at Mrs May having “caved in” to Labour’s Marxist-Leninist leader and reneged on a key Brexit promise; that Britain would take back control to do its own trade deals.
On the Labour side, we are told some two-thirds of Mr Corbyn’s MPs would defy their leader if no confirmatory public vote were attached to a compromise; something which hitherto has been anathema to the Leader of the Opposition.
Plus, just to make things even more unsettling for Mrs May, the inscrutable Tory grandee Sir Graham Brady, who chairs the 1922 backbench committee, is due to turn up in Downing St later today to urge Mrs May to “name the day” of her departure.
It will not be long off.
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If Mrs May cannot seal a deal with Mr Corbyn, she has offered indicative votes. Remember them. MPs, of course, were unable to back any of the options. The PM has said she would abide by the Commons’ choice but only if her Labour counterparty did likewise. He might not agree. And like last time MPs might be unable to coalesce on a way forward.
Having faced a humiliating local elections’ drubbing, Mrs May - now used to humiliation - is facing an even bigger one later this month in the European elections. I can already see the grinning face of Nigel Farage.
Mrs May’s survival after another electoral drubbing and without a Con-Lab agreement in her pocket looks impossible. So, a deal this week with Labour looks like the only show in town for our beleaguered PM.
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