At the beginning of May, Cabinet Brexiteers, including Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, openly derided the prime minister’s favored “customs partnership” proposal — which would involve the U.K. collecting tariffs on the bloc’s behalf to avoid a hard Irish border — and backbenchers threatened a leadership challenge should she sell them out. Come the end of the month, those same critics had swallowed the PM’s Irish border backstop, which would keep Britain inside part of the EU customs union after 2021 if no other arrangement is agreed. [...]
But, despite all the noise, May and her team believe they have found a fudge that the majority of her Cabinet can stomach, partly because some pro-Leave Tories didn’t realize what was happening, because others came around to May’s approach, and because the rest did not have a plan to stop it. [...]
No. 10 convinced them the commitment to “full alignment” with EU regulations in the absence of agreed solutions was merely a form of words to move talks on, Brexit-backing MPs say. In reality, the December text, coupled with the abandonment of the prime minister’s much-loved mantra that “no deal is better than a bad deal,” firmly set the U.K. on a path toward a close regulatory relationship with Brussels after Brexit. [...]
In a major win, May convinced some Brexiteers they should sign up to a deal they may not love in the short term, but that gives them a chance to diverge in the years ahead, according to officials in Downing Street and allies of Leave-supporting Cabinet ministers. She warned them that not doing so would see them end up with political turmoil and the possibility of no Brexit at all. To turn a phrase, “a bad deal is better than no deal.” [...]
The problem for those who subscribe to this view is they have little leverage to force May to change tack. Despite having the numbers to trigger a confidence vote that could topple the prime minister, most hard-line Brexiteers agree she would likely win the support of a majority of Tory MPs. What’s more, in the event that a challenge succeeds and installs a Brexiteer in Downing Street, this faction does not have enough votes in the House of Commons to get through their vision of Brexit, and that would not change without another general election.
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