May's Cabinet Openly Contradict Each Other on No Deal Brexit

(Bloomberg) -- U.K. Cabinet ministers don’t seem able to stick to an agreed line about whether they really will walk away from Brexit negotiations or not.

While Prime Minister Theresa May has been more reluctant to ramp up her rhetoric about “no deal” being “better than a bad deal” recently, her Brexit Secretary David Davis insisted on Tuesday that keeping the option of quitting talks on the table was essential.

“You have to have the right to walk away,” he said. Shortly afterwards, Home Secretary Amber Rudd told lawmakers in London that abandoning negotiations is “unthinkable.”

When May’s spokeswoman, Alison Donnelly, was asked if her boss agreed with her colleagues, she said Rudd was expressing the view that a deal was in the interests of both sides, while Davis “speaks on behalf of the government.”

Later on, International Trade Secretary Liam Fox took to the airwaves to say that the government was undertaking "substantial" work to prepare for the event of no deal being reached, which he said wouldn’t be a “disaster.”

Fox told LBC radio “we shouldn’t be afraid of not getting a deal. It’s not optimal for us, but we will survive it.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Tim Ross in London at tross54@bloomberg.net, Alex Morales in London at amorales2@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Flavia Krause-Jackson at fjackson@bloomberg.net, Emma Ross-Thomas