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Matthew Parris writing in the Times.
The way the Lady sees it,” Margaret Thatcher’s parliamentary private secretary, the late Ian Gow, once said to me, “is that once the crocodile is forced on to the mudbank you don’t help it back into the deep. You stick the knife in.” I’ve thought often of Ian’s advice since then, and never more urgently than this weekend. The Brexiteers are on a mudbank and beached; and a band of worried moderate Tory backbenchers and former ministers, anxious about the threat to their constituents’ livelihoods, ponder the hardest question of all in politics: not “what should I do?” but “when? Is now the moment?”
Behind the smiles, Boris Johnson and David Davis are floundering. It may prove the last, best moment. In a series of votes next week the knife must be wielded. Be in no doubt: the crocs are floundering. For the foreign secretary not only to believe that his government’s Brexit preparations are approaching (his word) “meltdown”, but to broadcast that opinion, suggests only one thing to those who know Boris Johnson. He’s heading noisily for the lifeboats.
I still blink in disbelief at three turbulent days last December. Mrs May thought she’d secured agreement for Northern Ireland to stay in an effective customs union with the EU until an invisible border with the Irish Republic could be invented. She was sent back to the negotiating table by the DUP’s Arlene Foster. And — lo! — she returned having enlarged that commitment to the whole of the United Kingdom! “That’s Brexit buggered,” I said to my partner as we walked alongside the Chesterfield Canal on December 8. And Boris? He rushed to congratulate May. Other Brexiteers bit their lips. They missed their moment. From December 6 to 8 their quarry was beached. They funked it.
The Brexit secretary, David Davis, kept his counsel about that Irish agreement, though he now seems to be suffering from late-onset buyer’s remorse. On Thursday the BBC misjudged the outcome of his latest spat with Downing Street. It was no victory for Mr Davis. The specifying of an end date for the duration of Britain’s continued “alignment” with EU trade rules was a decoy. The date is governed by the adjective “expected”. This makes (doubtless deliberately) nonsense of the pledge. We may expect all kinds of things, including the flying pigs that may well have to patrol the invisible Irish border. As Andrew Marr once said, in politics tortured syntax often betrays tortured thinking.
The next clash comes on Tuesday and Wednesday in the Commons division lobbies. This will be the biggest fight so far and, though not the last, may determine the final battle because it will define the battlefield. Let me explain. Government has already been forced to promise MPs a vote on the Brexit deal before Britain leaves, but that’s all. Ministers intend to wait until the last moment, then bounce parliament into assent by insisting that it’s this deal or no deal: ejection without parachute from the EU. Former Remainers won’t want this, obviously.