Theresa May promised the cabinet she would seek a deal that allowed the UK the “unilateral ability to withdraw” from any backstop arrangement, according to two senior ministers who told BuzzFeed News they feared the prime minister was about to row back on this commitment to secure a Brexit deal with the EU.



Ahead of Tuesday’s crunch cabinet meeting, two cabinet ministers told BuzzFeed News they were concerned May was about to break three key pledges on the backstop.

At a cabinet meeting after last month’s European council, the ministers believed they had secured commitments from May that the UK would be able to trigger a break clause to quit the backstop, that the EU’s proposal for a backstop treating Northern Ireland differently from the rest of the UK would be torn up, and that the UK would not remain indefinitely in a customs union.

Yet the two ministers told BuzzFeed News they are now concerned the UK is about to concede that it will not be able to unilaterally quit the backstop, that the Northern Ireland-only backstop remains in what they are calling a “Russian doll backstop”, and that it is now likely the UK will not leave a customs union with the EU after Brexit.

They were reacting to Ireland’s deputy prime minister, Simon Coveney, who tweeted that “a time-limited backstop or a backstop that could be ended by UK unilaterally would never be agreed to by IRE or EU”. Coveney was backed up by Brussels negotiator Sabine Weyand, who retweeted him with the words “Still necessary to repeat this, it seems.”