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This veto is guaranteed by the dominance of radical Euroscepticism within Mrs May’s Conservative Party, a dominance that Westminster-based commentators often overlook.
It is extraordinary to recall that some commentators initially regarded the outcome of the Chequers meeting on 13th July as a triumph for the Prime Minister. At the end of that meeting Mrs May expressed the pious hope that it would put an end to Cabinet divisions on Europe and mark the restitution of collective Cabinet responsibility. The following days saw the resignation of precisely those Ministers whose task it would have been to implement the new European policy: David Davis, Steve Baker and Boris Johnson. In normal political times and on any other topic, these dramatic events would have been regarded as a probably mortal humiliation of a sitting Prime Minister. Instead, in the days immediately after these resignations, Mrs May and her supporters had some success in selling to the more gullible among commentators the nonsensical claim that this Cabinet crisis had strengthened the Prime Minister, both domestically and internationally. Such claims always rested on several highly questionable assumptions about the Conservative Party and Mrs May’s situation within it. Their unsustainability has been vividly demonstrated over the past week.
Notable among these doubtful assumptions was the view that the events of the past week marked a fundamental break between Mrs May and the most radical Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative Party. It is true that the adopted Chequers text is one that would never have commanded the support of that wing. The chairman of the European Research Group (ERG) Jacob Rees-Mogg immediately attacked the text and put down Parliamentary amendments to strike out some of its provisions. A number of his supporters have gone so far as to call for Mrs May’s replacement as Conservative leader. But Jacob Rees-Mogg has been at pains to stress that he is not seeking to destroy Mrs May’s premiership, but rather to reverse by a process of internal opposition those elements of the Chequers agreement which he finds unacceptable. He has the best possible prospects of doing so. It has been a recurrent mistake of outside commentators to underestimate the will and capacity of the ERG and its allies. While they represent only a minority of the Conservative Parliamentary Party, their attitudes are widely, indeed almost universally supported within the Conservative Party as a whole. [...]
Brutal Brexit ahead
There is a dawning realisation among British commentators and economic actors that a brutal and chaotic Brexit in March is becoming more likely. Businesses and financial operators in particular are drawing up and publicising plans based on this apocalyptic hypothesis. But even now there is lurking in the minds of many the hope and belief that the Commons, which has a clear majority against a catastrophic Brexit, will in some unspecified way be able and willing to avert disaster. At least two considerations speak against this reassuring expectation: the growing proximity of the March 2019 deadline, triggering automatic Brexit; and the overall configuration of the House of Commons arising from the General Election of 2017. [...]
Full article on The Federal Trust website