Is May’s dead parrot about to be resuscitated by MPs of straw?

Is the dead parrot about to stagger back onto its perch? Are the most steely Brexiteers really about to demonstrate that they are in fact people of straw?

Today’s Sunday Times reports “growing confidence” in Downing Street that the prime minister, Theresa May, will get her widely excoriated Brexit deal through parliament. Her allies report a “significant improvement” in the number of MPs who are prepared to support it.

“Speculation is swirling that the prime minister may be able to extract a meaningful concession from the EU on the Irish backstop, the insurance policy that aims to keep the border on the island of Ireland open after Brexit.

“This would enable some members of the arch-Eurosceptic European Research Group (ERG), including Jacob Rees-Mogg, its chairman, to back the deal. A cabinet minister described securing Rees-Mogg’s support for the deal as ‘work in progress’”.

But Mrs May’s deal is appalling even without the Irish border issue (which threatens to appropriate part of the UK under EU rule and prevent the UK from ever leaving the EU without its permission). As others have observed, the rest of the deal keeps Britain under the EU’s thumb but without any representation. That’s why many Remainers along with Brexiteers were united in declaring that Mrs May’s deal was a total non-starter because it would leave the UK in a significantly worse position than under the terms of its current EU membership.

You can read a few typical opinions why this deal is so terrible, from both Remainers and Leavers, here, here, here and here.

So are these MPs really that shallow? If they are, they are playing with democratic fire. Some, of course, are not just playing with it but taking a flaming torch and throwing it onto the democratic pyre.

Amber Rudd, uber-Remainer and wannabe prime minister, has the gall to claim that there is now a “plausible case” for a second referendum if the parliamentary deadlock over Brexit is to be broken. But there is no parliamentary deadlock over the one thing that matters – honouring the vote to leave the EU; and that’s because parliament itself voted overwhelmingly to do that and to do so by March 29 2019.

Rudd herself paid lip service to “absolute respect” for that referendum vote – until she stopped doing so and set out openly to spit in the eye of the voters. What Rudd calls “deadlock” is in fact nothing more than the attempt by MPs like herself to try to reverse the decision by both the people and parliament to leave the EU, but without being seen to do so.

A no-deal Brexit under WTO rules is “unthinkable”, she claims, like “a car crash”. Numerous others have said this is total rubbish. As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has written:

“’No deal is better than a bad deal’ – the words upon which Amber Rudd and every other Tory MP campaigned. Mervyn King, former Bank of England Governor, backs WTO rules above May’s ‘muddled commitment to perpetual subordination’. Ex-MI6 boss Sir Richard Dearlove says ‘WTO terms is now the only viable way to leave the EU’, pointing to the ‘hysterical demonisation’ of this option. ‘There is nothing to fear from WTO rules,’ Sir Anthony Bamford, the boss of JCB, one of the UK’s most successful exporters, remarked last week. Such comments, from people of massive expertise, have attracted scant attention.”

Leaving with no deal is far from optimal. There are bound to be problems and disruption; an enormous undertaking such as leaving the EU can hardly be achieved without at least some of that. Worse, much worse, is to leave with no deal after the government has spent two years refusing to put the country onto a no-deal footing and take all necessary steps to minimise disruption.

But the apocalyptic scenarios are being deliberately exaggerated. As Evans-Pritchard MelaniePhillips.com.