A junior minister has resigned over the government’s planned Brexit deal, marking the start of a potentially treacherous day for Theresa May in which she must present the plan to parliament amid talk of more exits and a possible challenge to her leadership.
Shailesh Vara, a minister in the Northern Ireland office, tweeted a resignation letter saying the plan May pushed through cabinet in a marathon meeting on Wednesday would “leave the UK in a halfway house with no time limit on when we will finally become a sovereign nation”.
Vara, the North West Cambridgeshire MP who backed remain in the 2016 referendum, said he feared the UK would stay in limbo for years while a permanent deal with the EU was negotiated.
“We will be locked in a customs arrangement indefinitely, bound by rules determined by the EU over which we will have no say,” he wrote. “Worse, we will not be free to leave the customs arrangement unilaterally if we wish to do so.”
Vara concluded: “We are a proud nation, and it is a sad day when we are reduced to obeying rules made by other countries who have shown that they do not have our best interests at heart. We can and must do better than this.”
The resignation came as the health secretary, Matt Hancock, was sent out to argue that while the deal led to dissent in the cabinet meeting, it had now been agreed to, and was the only plan on offer.
But the shadow Brexit secretary, Keir Starmer, called the plan “a miserable failure of negotiation”, and said Labour would vote against it.
May is due to spend up to three hours on Thursday morning presenting the plan to a likely hostile parliament. There are reports…
