The charade starts again, the charivari, the pantomime “negotiations” between team May and the Corbyn crew. The play-acting, the feinting and feigning, still pretending there is progress, scarifying both parties’ rank and file. Rory Stewart exposed his wet-behind-the-ears arrival in the cabinet by obediently delivering Downing Street’s line that “our positions are only a quarter of an inch apart”. Well, that’s the longest quarter-inch in history.
In the meantime, in unparalleled parliamentary paralysis, the chancellor has abandoned his promised three-year spending review, with no sign of the long-delayed social care green paper. Instead, this week’s only item in the Commons is the wild animals in circuses bill.
A rota of cabinet ministers and their shadows will put up a good show of bogus talks, with codicils, annexes and marginalia to keep them occupied, but no concordance on the substance. After one more week it ends, says David Lidington, Theresa May’s proto-deputy. Then comes mutual blame, though agreement was never remotely plausible. “Let’s do a deal,” May archly implored Jeremy Corbyn in her Mail on Sunday article. A historic May-Corbyn peace pact? Hardly, and she knows it. Unless, that is, when May has finally run out of road she dares to go for a confirmatory vote because there is absolutely nothing else left.
Today Graham Brady, chair of the backbench 1922 Committee, will pay her an intimidating visit. The committee’s treasurer told the BBC’s Today programme that Brady will demand her “roadmap” to a rapid departure “in the very near future”, with no backsliding on the customs union. Brady brings a warning that at the 1922 meeting this evening, the backbench pressure-cooker may explode over the local elections disaster, demanding a rule-change to remove her fast.
Labour’s shadow cabinet also meets today, after a frisson of fright ran through most of the party when Corbyn appeared to ignore agreed policy in responding to the shock election results. The Labour leader claimed it was “very, very clear” that voters want MPs to “get a deal done”. Any deal, just to “get over the line”? But to most Labour supporters this isn’t a marathon, it’s a jump off a 28-country-high tower block with no bungee rope. Both John McDonnell and Keir Starmer rushed to TV studios to correct any idea that a Brexit stitch-up was imminent. McDonnell told Sunday’s Andrew Marr Show he had “no trust” in May and her “bad faith”. Starmer on Sky repeated his unchanging position: there must be a “permanent comprehensive customs union” and a means for “locking in the next Tory leader”. Above all, a confirmatory vote “has to be part of the package”. None of those three has ever been offered by May.
But now her party is giving her weeks not months: MEP Daniel Hannan wants her gone before the European elections. She will leave with no legacy, her profound sense of Brexit duty unfulfilled and nothing but our three years of hell to show for it. Or in that last gasp, she could reach for one last chance by agreeing the Kyle-Wilson compromise – for Labour to nod through her deal but only with a final-say public vote. Voters see a deadlocked parliament with no majority for anything: there is no other jury but them to turn to. Monday’s Telegraph headline read: “May in secret discussions on second referendum.” Downing Street duly denied it, but she must surely consider it.
Could it get through parliament? Senior Labour head-counters think so: 203 Labour MPs, when whipped, voted for it twice, along with just 15 Tories. If May whipped her payroll vote it would get through – if enough obeyed her whip. No one can be sure. But as two shadow cabinet members doing the counting tell me, there’s no chance at all of any Brexit deal getting through without that confirmatory vote. In the last chance saloon, that’s the only drink she has left.
On all sides misinformation and rumours abound. The “leak” that May will offer a full customs union to last until the general election, coupled with Stewart’s promise that a soft Brexit pact is close, has put May’s angry brigade into what the Telegraph calls a fury of “biblical proportions” risking a “Tory implosion”. Yet again, she was just trying to dragoon her deplorables into a panicky vote for her deal by threatening something worse.
They need not fear: the parties were never near agreeing. On the Labour side, rumours that Starmer might resign over Corbyn’s constant Brexit backsliding and prevaricating seem wide of the mark, but someone was sending shots across the bows of the Corbynite pro-Brexit cabal. Labour’s lightweight frontbench can’t afford to lose any heavy-hitting remainers. In the Euro elections Labour is already in grievous peril of losing cascades of voters, unless Corbyn himself campaigns unequivocally for a final-say ballot.
This matters far beyond the risk of Labour getting a bloody nose: these elections are our proxy referendum. It’s a sad folly that the smaller remain parties couldn’t set aside tribalism to stand on a single slate – but they promise in the final week to combine to tell voters how best to elect a remainer in each area – such as voting Liberal Democrat in the south-west and Change UK in London. On the night, aggregate “pro-final say” vote numbers will be counted, totting up Green, Liberal Democrat and Change UK ballots. Labour has to be wholeheartedly for a public ballot, to add those votes to the national tally.
As the knock on her door tells Theresa May her time is up, let her look to her legacy. With her unsurpassed reputation as the most pitiful failure of a prime minister, she has less than nothing to lose. A public vote is her last chance to get any kind of deal through: she should seize it.