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Courtesy of the Times - could be the beginning of the end for Jezza.
Labour MPs defied Jeremy Corbyn’s appeal to boycott Downing Street talks on Brexit as it emerged that a second Brexit referendum would take a year to arrange. Hilary Benn and Yvette Cooper, two of the party’s most senior backbench figures, led a parade of Labour MPs attending talks with Theresa May and other senior cabinet ministers. Mr Corbyn refused last night to see Mrs May until the option of leaving the EU without a deal was removed and prevented other Labour frontbenchers from accepting invitations earlier today.
He then urged all Labour MPs to also snub the prime minister in an emailed letter. That appeal was ignored, however, as both main party leaders struggled to maintain control in the Brexit crisis.
In addition to Mr Benn and Ms Cooper, Labour MPs seen arriving for negotiations in the Cabinet Office included Stephen Kinnock, John Mann and Ben Bradshaw. Meanwhile, it has emerged that a second Brexit referendum would take a year to arrange, according to an official paper prepared for Mrs May’s cross-party Brexit talks. Her spokeswoman admitted that officials had drawn up a paper on a referendum after Liz Saville-Roberts, the Plaid Cymru leader at Westminster, disclosed the details of her meeting with the prime minister. “The prime minister made it clear how much they'd already been looking at these areas themselves,” she told Sky News following her meeting in No 10 last night.
The Welsh nationalist added: “We were able to go into some depth about the considerations. That was particularly interesting with her yesterday. Then today with Michael Gove and David Lidington we went into considerably more detail about what would be the necessary procedure to bring forward a People’s Vote: what the House would need to do, what the time requirements would be, what would be the necessity for Article 50.” It is understood that the short paper — described as a “single sheet of A4” — had included an estimate that it would take a year to arrange to hold a second vote. Campaigners insist that the necessary logistics, including legislation, could be compressed into a couple of months.