WHAT’LL TAKE: “Pass my Brexit deal and by this time next year we’ll all be millionaires!” May is to tell MPs, as she bids to drag her dead pet Brexit deal out of the cemetery and back to the Commons for a fourth time.
The deal, rebranded yesterday by a pliant Brexit Secretary and compliant BBC, as ‘the Barnier deal’, is expected to be dragged with a chain around its ankle out of the musty Westminster soil and back into the lower house in June.
”Theresa doesn’t take no for an answer,” a Downing Street insider revealed, “although she quite likes to say no, especially to asylum seekers and people who came here legally, but are now being tormented by retrospective immigration law changes, designed to make Britain grate again.”
Why the rebranding is a question?
”It has to be done ahead of the next failure. Continuing to call it the ‘May Deal’ is a political risk for the prime minister. She wasn’t damaged by the first trio of fails, but a fourth or fifth? A sixth or seventh? That might dent her reputation as strong and stable.”
So it’s Barnier’s fault?
”Yes. He should never have set down those red lines in the Lancaster House speech. Reckless and short sighted of him. Seriously, you’d think the EU, with its reputation for negotiating, would have picked someone prepared to think ahead.”
Presumably May can tell MPs that it’s the EU’s fault too?
“Yes. When she’s not busy telling everyone it’s her own MPs fault that Brexit hasn’t been delivered. Which it is of course, something future generations may well thank them for. Which is a nice twist for frothing mouthed ideologues, to actually do something useful, even if it’s by accident.”
But how will May’s latest argument go over with the lower house?
“Hard to say, so many of the MPs are millionaires already, it’s not exactly an incentive.”