The Gordian knot of Brexit has started to come loose. We have got to that stage of untangling a set of Christmas tree lights where you can feel rather than see how the impossible mass could be resolved.
Tuesday’s vote for the second reading of the EU (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill was the historic moment. There is now a majority in the House of Commons in favour of the principle of getting Brexit done. That still leaves the question of when it might get done, but it feels different from what has gone before.
It is hard to see the way ahead because no one is saying what they mean. After the Commons voted against Boris Johnson’s unreasonably short timetable for getting Brexit done, Jeremy Corbyn offered to discuss a “reasonable” timetable with him.
The prime minister, not unreasonably, didn’t believe him. Labour has engaged in insincere negotiations before, with Theresa May – negotiations which predictably got nowhere and resulted in the election of Johnson as her successor.
It is worth remembering, incidentally, when Labour complains about Johnson’s right-wing hard Brexit, that it could have had May’s slightly less right-wing, slightly softer Brexit if the party had voted for it.
So Johnson didn’t think Corbyn really would agree a timetable for the Brexit legislation. He knows that Corbyn does not want to be portrayed as the enabler of Brexit. It is not just that Labour Party members would be cross, but that Labour’s strategy after we leave the EU has to be built on complaining about the terrible consequences of a “Tory Brexit” – which would be harder if the response was, “You allowed it to happen.”
The prime minister, or some of his advisers at least, understand the significance of losing control of the parliamentary timetable. Without what in the old days used to be called a “guillotine” but in today’s sanitised language is called a “programme motion”, the government cannot easily bring a debate to a close.
That is why we got the distracting nonsense on Thursday about a pre-Christmas election. It is not going to happen. Johnson needs at least 127 opposition MPs to vote for it on Monday to reach the two-thirds majority required. Labour MPs are worried about losing their seats, and they have the excuse that EU leaders have not yet formally agreed to extend the 31 October Brexit deadline.
That means that a no-deal Brexit is still “on the table”, as Corbyn puts it, and Labour refuses to dissolve parliament because leaving without a deal on Thursday is still theoretically possible.
Johnson’s next hope was that Emmanuel Macron would help by insisting on a short extension. This would impose a hard timetable on the UK parliament from the outside.
According to James Forsyth of The Spectator, the prime minister sang “Oh come, oh come Emmanuel” to the cabinet on Thursday – but he had to admit that the French president was “too isolated” to prevent EU leaders agreeing a longer extension.
If they agree to move the deadline to the end of January, that doesn’t take no-deal Brexit off the table, however; it just moves the table to the next room. Labour will still refuse to vote for an election, arguing that the prime minister could set a date in February and that we could still leave without a deal on 31 January.
There are other routes to an election, but they don’t work either. Corbyn refuses to table a motion of no confidence in Johnson’s government, and would find a reason not to vote for one tabled by the Scottish National Party. He does not want to fight an election while Britain is still in the EU, because he would spend much of the campaign explaining that Labour is the party of both Leave and Remain.
Johnson refuses to table a bill to amend the Fixed-term Parliaments Act and set the election date. This has the advantage from his point of view that he would need only a simple majority in the Commons, rather than a two-thirds vote, and the SNP and Lib Dems might vote for it. But such a bill would also be amended, and the opposition parties would combine to give the vote to 2 million EU citizens. They are already on the electoral roll for local elections, and, unlike 16 year olds, could be enfranchised immediately for a general election. The prime minister does not want to fight a Brexit election against 2 million additional anti-Brexit voters.
So I don’t think there is going to be an election, and I suspect that, if EU leaders agree a three-month extension, all they will do is create another Brexit crisis in the run-up to 31 January. By then, they may run out of patience and refuse any further extensions, but lots of people said that about the 31 October date.
Without an election or an externally imposed deadline, the only way parliament will force itself to make a decision is by setting itself a timetable. In the end, it will take eight MPs who voted for the bill on Tuesday but against the programme motion to switch sides and agree a new timetable. That means independent Conservative MPs such as Philip Hammond, the former chancellor, and Labour MPs such as Dan Jarvis, the mayor of the Sheffield city region, hold the fate of Brexit in their hands.
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