Are Brexit rebel Tory MPs in the ERG telling each other the truth?

How much are you enjoying Brexit and the government’s handling of it? Oh. I see. Well, not long to go now. We’ll know one way or another within weeks whether there is a deal and then if it can or cannot get though the House of Commons. Exciting, isn’t it?

If – that’s if – the Prime Minister manages to get a Brexit deal agreed with the EU this month or next, a key vote (the meaningful vote) on the deal will take place when Tory chief whip Julian Smith MP gives the go ahead. A division will take place. It’ll be quite the drama that night.

A defeat of a deal would most likely be a seismic event, leaving the way open to market chaos and a no deal scenario, a patched together no deal deal (made up of temporary arrangements on aviation and finance) or to Remainers in the Commons demanding a second referendum or a delay on Brexit as a route to stopping it. Smith and the other whips have to get their numbers right and the timing absolutely perfect if May’s deal is to get Commons approval. Rarely in the fiendishly difficult field of British parliamentary intelligence-gathering about the intentions of rogue MPs has such a call mattered more.

“The vote will probably be in a window of about two weeks, late November, very early December, after the PM comes back to parliament to explain the deal,” says a cabinet minister. “It’ll be when Julian thinks we can win.”

The working assumption now seems to be that October’s Brexit summit is about “progress” and then November is the clincher. All troublingly tight in terms of time.

But the reason it is so difficult to judge the outcome of a vote is that there are several tricky variables.

The DUP will probably vote for a deal, and the assumption is that they will. Number 10 understands that the UK cannot be divided up in customs terms to suit the EU. The DUP might, however, think the language on Ireland is too soft and upend the government.

Anti-Corbyn Labour rebels are tricky to read and generally quiet. On the day how many Labour rebels are there who might vote with the government to get a deal through in (that dread phrase) the national interest? It’s unclear, and there is a school of thought that says they won’t back a deal in the end for fear of the backlash.

Yet individual MPs, and even party leaders, can act in unexpected fashion at a moment of national importance. Blair got through the Iraq votes on March 18th 2003 with the aid of Tory votes in the Commons.

In my column in The Times last week I referred to moderate, patriotic Labour MPs in leave constituencies who – I suspect, but we’ll see – won’t vote with Corbyn to bring about chaos when they are anyway about to be deselected by the Marxist maniacs. Over the weekend I heard of others who will vote for a deal if they can. Such is the risks these people will have to run – and the abuse on social media from Corbynistas and People’s Vote loonies – that they are unlikely to hold a press conference announcing their intentions to deliver Brexit via a compromise deal.

But probably the most tricky group for the whips and the media to count is the diehard Brexit faction, best represented by the ERG, the European Research Group run by Jacob Rees-Mogg and Steve Baker. Former Brexit Secretary David Davis, who knows about whipping difficult votes from his days on the government side as a whip during the Maastricht rebellion, is a key advisor.

How many of the ERGers will vote with Corbyn to kill the deal? The number of upwards of 80 has been floating around, thanks to Baker, a straight-dealing guy, but it’s important to be precise about the language. There are probably more than 100 Tory MPs who don’t like Chequers. Disliking it and voting to kill a deal are a different matter.

Several weeks ago Baker brought the number of rebels down to about 40. He repeated that figure on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning.

Tensions are running high in ERGland as a deal and a vote approaches. There are good people in the ERG who see this in terms of applying maximum pressure, in the hope that May concedes as little as possible or pivots to a Canada-style deal, a looser trading relationship to be defined after exit day next year.

It is all getting personal too. At the weekend, when the Sunday Times and Tim Shipman reported that members of the ERG are threatening to vote down the Budget, there was an explosion from Bernard Jenkin MP, who denied he had been disloyal to the Prime Minister on an ERG conference call last week. The inestimable, magnificent Baroness Jenkin, a Tory peer, is a friend and supporter of Theresa May. Later, Bernard Jenkin angrily made it clear on social media on Sunday that contrary to the Sunday Times report he supports May.

I am too simple a soul to work out what went on there.

This spat prompted my thought about other members of the ERG, however. Sometimes we hacks present the membership of the ERG as a fixed bloc with an agreed policy. That is simply not so. There is ebb and there is flow. Quite a few members of the ERG want careers afterwards and have houses and shares that they probably don’t want stolen by John McDonnell after the election of a Corbyn government.

History shows people under pressure in politics operating at high speed say different versions of the same thing, and sometimes different things entirely, to their colleagues.

The pressure in the event of a deal in November will be immense. The deal will have been endorsed by the EU 27 – including Chancellor Merkel and President Macron. The bulk of the engaged part of the British public, which does not want a no deal outcome, will be shouting “get on with it,” I suspect.

In that context I wonder: Are the ERG crowd all telling each other truth about their intentions? Some will be, but can they count on all their colleagues when it comes to it? The ERG is rock solid now, they tell us. They’ll vote for no deal because it will, as one ERG member put it to me, “free things up.” That is one term for what lies in store if a deal falls through.

The decision of Tory rebels to kill or not to kill a deal is one of the great British political dramas of our lifetime unfolding now. Shakespeare understood the dilemmas involved better than anyone. Ambition, guilt, legacy, duty, loyalty, treachery, history, principle and chicanery are all in play.

I cannot answer the question, I simply pose it. The assumption is that as many as 40 Tory MPs are dead against a deal and will kill it. Are they all telling each the truth? Soon we’ll know.

Iain Martin,

Editor and Publisher, Reaction