British Prime Minister Theresa May has no intention of delivering meaningful Brexit; her June 2018 Withdrawal Agreement was drafted secretly in collusion with German Chancellor Angela Merkel with a view to keeping as many European Union (EU) laws and institutions as possible; May’s and Merkel’s ultimate game plan is for Britain to re-join the EU in full some time after the next general election…

These are the allegations of an extraordinary memo currently being circulated feverishly on social media.

To me, it smacks of a conspiracy theory to rank with those stories about the clandestine Establishment plot to murder Princess Diana.

But the fact that people seem ready to believe it speaks volumes about the state of distrust between May’s Remainer political establishment and the Brexit voting electorate. May and her Civil Servants have handled Brexit so very, very badly that for some Brexiteers the only plausible explanation is not cock-up but outright treachery.

The memo was originally published, briefly, at the website of the Eurosceptic Bruges Group. Then quickly taken down.

Now AltNews Media has re-published it here with a disclaimer that it cannot vouch for the memo’s accuracy.

It claims:

On Monday July 9th 2018, several leading French, German and Dutch senior managers were called by EU officials to an urgent meeting. The meeting was said to be private and those present were informed that Prime Minister May and Chancellor Merkel had reached an Agreement over Brexit. Knowledge of this was attained from the actual transcript of the meeting between May and Merkel. 1) The Agreement was couched in a way to ‘appease’ the Brexit voters. 2) The Agreement would enable May to get rid of those people in her party who were against progress and unity in the EU. 3) Both Merkel and May agreed that the likely course of events would be that UK would re-join the EU in full at some time after the next general election. 4) May agreed to keep as many EU laws and institutions as she could despite the current groundswell of ‘anti-EU hysteria’ in Britain (May’s own words, apparently.) 5) Merkel and May agreed that the only realistic future for the UK was within the EU. The original Agreement draft was completed in May 2018 in Berlin and then sent to the UK Government Cabinet Office marked ‘Secret’.

A spokesman for the Bruges Group told me that it still stands by the claims but that it had never meant to publish them in memo form. A fuller, better-supported version of the article will go up shortly, I am told.

The author of the memo is John Petley, who for many years worked for the small, cross-party Eurosceptic campaign group Campaign for Independent Britain.

Petley told me he had got the information from an impeccable source which had proved extremely reliable in the past about other matters. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist,” he said.

He said that there were a number things that appeared to back up the claims in his memo. Some of the wording in the Withdrawal Agreement – though he could not specify which – read as if it had been translated into English from German. He is also mystified by some of the concessions made in the Withdrawal Agreement, such as Britain’s support for an integrated European army – something which before 2016 it had opposed on the grounds that NATO already served this function.

“I think the backstop was just a smokescreen to distract us from the many worse problems within the Withdrawal Agreement,” Petley told me.

Me, I’m filing it under “Huge if true…”