Evening Standard comment: Yesterday brought clarity, not chaos, on Brexit; Saving London lives

Evening Standard Comment28 March 2019

That's clear, then. Really, it is. Ignore the acres of lazy commentary about chaos in the Commons. Yesterday resolved a number of key questions about Brexit and British politics.

First, Theresa May has resigned. True to her short and undistinguished premiership, she delivered her message to her party not the country, and she couldn’t quite bring herself to spit it out in clear English — she merely acknowledged the near-universal scream for what she called “new leadership”.

But there’s no doubt now. She’ll be out by the summer.

If her deal passes, she wants her swansong to be her appearance at the G20 in Japan in late June.

There are echoes of David Cameron’s plan in the summer of 2016 for a leisurely departure, waiting until after an autumn G20 summit in China. As it was, he was hustled out in just a fortnight.

If Mrs May loses the vote on her deal (or doesn’t hold it) then she will be gone very quickly. You can’t say: “If I succeed, I’ll go; but if I fail, I’ll stay.”

There will be crocodile tears from the Cabinet and MPs but almost all will be glad to see her gone.

The looming car crash for the Conservative Party is this: the leadership contest now under way will only select someone who draws the same undeliverable red lines as she did, but it cannot change the parliamentary arithmetic that defeated her.

The second thing that has become clear is that Mrs May’s sacrifice is still not enough to save her deal.

We explained last week that even if leading Brexiteers, and the DUP, do a U-turn, it wouldn’t be enough. But yesterday there was still the usual flurry of excitement from the usual excitable commentators that her act of self-immolation had saved the day.

Ever anxious about missing the boat, Boris Johnson panicked. The man who resigned from the Cabinet over the deal, then spent months denouncing the “slave state” it would create, joined Jacob Rees-Mogg in a Mao-style public recantation.

His political stalker Dominic Raab has not, yet. The ERG’s deputy leader, Steve Baker, went further and said he’d rather resign from the Tory Party than vote for her deal.

Mr Johnson must have woken up today with the words of Homer Simpson on his lips: Doh! For he knows, as he’s been saying privately, that the deal is dead — and he exposed the truth that he didn’t have a big enough following to resurrect it.

The third thing that became clear yesterday is that there is a way forward on Brexit.

You wouldn’t guess that from the screaming headlines about how MPs voted “no, no, no” to all the options put before them. That was always predicted, not least by the MP who organised them, Oliver Letwin.

But the results for the different options were very different. A no-deal Brexit, the “Malthouse compromise” and a straight Norway option were all heavily defeated.

But permanent membership of the customs union — a policy the Evening Standard has advocated for two years — was only eight votes short of commanding a majority.

The Cabinet abstained in the votes. The only way they can stay united now is if they don’t express an opinion.

If they had been allowed to vote, as they will eventually, and others who abstained had taken part, then there would have been a majority for staying in the customs union.

But the bigger surprise yesterday was how close the vote was for the idea, proposed by former foreign secretary Margaret Beckett, for a “confirmatory” referendum on any deal to leave the EU.

It was close because former recalcitrant Jeremy Corbyn whipped the Labour Party in support, a sign that the million marchers last Saturday are having an impact.

What conclusions can we draw from all of this?

If the deal can’t pass, if the Tory Party is about to have a leadership contest, if MPs are looking to a customs union, and if either a referendum and/or a general election is a real possibility, then Brexit is heading for a long delay.

That’s clear, then.