27 February 2019

Financial Times: Jacob Rees-Mogg softens position on Theresa May’s Brexit deal

Mr Rees-Mogg told the Financial Times that he was no longer insisting that the contentious “Irish backstop” be scrapped as a condition for his support for Mrs May’s deal and was prepared to consider other legal fixes to ensure it did not become permanent.

“I think people are rather struck by her doggedness and don’t want to stand up and take a potshot at her,” he said of the prime minister he sought to unseat as leader of the Conservative party last year.

Mr Rees-Mogg and his pro-Brexit European Research Group of MPs will play a vital role when Mrs May returns to the Commons for a decisive vote on a revised deal with the EU — as she has promised to do by no later than March 12.

The ERG accounts for as many as 90 of the Conservatives’ 314 MPs and its willingness to vote against Mrs May’s original deal last month contributed to the agreement’s record-breaking 230-vote defeat.

But the grouping now may have to decide whether to back a tweaked deal to avoid a delay to Brexit or indeed no Brexit at all, given the Labour party’s shift this week towards calling for a second EU referendum.

Mr Rees-Mogg insisted that Mrs May’s decision to contemplate a delay to Brexit, possibly until the end of June, if she cannot pass a deal in the House of Commons had not put pressure on the ERG to back down. [...]

He said the potential delay had “in a strange way not really fundamentally changed anything”. ERG members believe that a no-deal exit is still a possibility, even if the cliff-edge may have receded by three months.

The Eurosceptic leader even suggested that a three-month delay would allow Britain to step up preparations for a no-deal exit in the summer and for Brussels and London to work up technological solutions to maintain an open border in Ireland, instead of the backstop. [...]

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