Theresa May’s Brexit Deal Still Looks Doomed. Here’s the Calculation

(Bloomberg) -- Theresa May is putting the main part of her divorce deal back to Parliament on Friday, after a dramatic promise to quit if it gets approved. Her pledge has changed the arithmetic, but probably not enough.

In parallel to debating May’s deal, members of Parliament are trying to find an alternative way through the impasse with a series of non-binding “indicative votes.” The results this week showed just how hard it will be to find a consensus that a Conservative prime minister could deliver. There’s another round of voting on Monday.

Here’s how the arithmetic’s looking for May’s deal – and for other possible solutions.

The Challenge

The first time May put her deal to a vote, it was defeated by 432 to 202 votes in the Commons, the biggest loss for any government for more than 100 years.

The second time she tried, she lost again by 391 votes to 242. To win, she needs 320 MPs on her side, two of whom aren’t included in the tallies, because they count the votes. So she’s 76 MPs short. Where to find them?

The Democratic Unionist Party: 0 to 10

Northern Ireland’s 10 DUP members, who prop up May’s minority government, don’t have many votes, but are crucial to the process. Despite hopes that they might give way and support her deal, or at least abstain, they remain implacably opposed to a deal that contains the Irish border backstop.

Conservatives: 20 to 45

Those voting against May’s deal last time included 75 Tories, mainly from the pro-Brexit European Research Group caucus. Since then, there’s been a big wobble, helped by May effectively removing the prospect of a no-deal Brexit (which many euro-skeptics would prefer) and promising to let someone else handle the next stage of negotiations, which focus on the future.

Some of the best-known members of the ERG, including its chair, Jacob Rees-Mogg, have announced that, though they had previously described the prime minister’s deal as “vassalage’’ and “not Brexit’’ they could, after all, vote for it. But there are problems. Rees-Mogg, for one, will only vote for the deal if the DUP does. And the ERG’s most famous faces aren’t its most radical. There are around 20 – estimates vary – who simply won’t vote for the deal as it stands.

On the other, pro-EU wing of the Tory party are around eight MPs who don’t want Brexit and will vote against it.

Labour: 0 to 24

At the last attempt, May got the support of just three Labour MPs. But in the indicative votes process, a further 24 disobeyed party instructions to vote against another referendum, and 18 abstained. These are MPs who represent pro-Brexit districts or who believe the country has to accept the result and move on.

But 24 is probably the upper limit for Labour MPs who might vote for the deal. The real number is likely to be much lower. May’s announcement that she’s leaving means that the next stage of Brexit, negotiating what Britain’s relationship with the EU will be like in the future, will be handled by a new prime minister, to be chosen by the Conservative Party. It will be very hard for Labour MPs to trust that this person would opt for the sort of Brexit they would like.

Adding it up

May needs 76 more votes, and even if she got the maximum number from each of the above groups, she would barely scrape over the line. So she could get a lot closer, but her deal still seems to be doomed.

Could anything else work?

In the indicative votes process, the two options that did best were a customs union and a second referendum, which superficially suggests May should move to offering one of those.

The problem comes when you look at who voted for what. The customs union proposal got 265 votes, with 271 MPs voting against. But only 33 of the votes in favor came from Conservatives, whereas they supplied 235 of the votes against.

The picture is even starker for a second referendum. Just eight of the 268 votes for that came from Tories, whereas the party was behind 254 of the 295 votes against.

Against that background, it looks impossible for a Conservative prime minister to support either option, with her party so opposed to them both.

Will a new prime minister help?

Wednesday’s votes on Plan B options were the first time that Conservative MPs have been free to record their Brexit preferences. The results were revealing. The only proposals that received support from a majority of Tory MPs were variations on leaving the EU without a deal.

The fact that Tory politicians are so euro-skeptic matters because these politicians are the first voters who Conservative leadership candidates will need to win over. This means the leadership contest is likely to push all candidates towards taking a harder Brexit stance.

The grassroots party membership, which has the final vote on the leader, is almost certainly even more hostile to the EU than the MPs. To win, a candidate could have to take such a hardline Brexit stance that they will find it impossible to get their plan through Parliament as a whole. That could mean another general election.

To contact the reporter on this story: Robert Hutton in London at rhutton1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Tim Ross at tross54@bloomberg.net, Emma Ross-Thomas

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