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To stay or not to stay in the customs union? (And if you’re not sure what the it is and why it matters, here’s a handy guide.) That’s fast becoming the question after the government suffered humiliating defeats in the Lords.

Most notably, and with the support of 24 Tories including three ex-ministers, peers convincingly backed an amendment to the EU withdrawal bill that would force the government to explain what it had done to pursue remaining in a union.

Theresa May came under heavy pressure to reopen the question of Britain’s membership of a customs union, which has been one of the government’s red lines since her Lancaster House speech in January last year.

Ministers braced themselves for a crunch early Commons vote on the same issue this week after 10 select committee chairs – including Conservatives – tabled a motion urging the government to “include as an objective in negotiations … the establishment of an effective customs union”.

Amid rumours that the prime minister was ready to agree to staying in , pro-Brexiters lined up to warn darkly against a betrayal that they said would precipitate a political crisis, Downing Street was forced to rule out any U-turn.

Unfortunately, business would like a customs union. So would Labour, the Irish government (because it would help solve that pesky border problem) and the EU, which again rejected the UK’s Irish border proposals – and added that Brexit talks could still fail. So, Theresa: no pressure.

In other news, the government on Monday suffered its third Brexit defeat in the Lords in less than a week (on excluding EU rights from national law), and talks on the future relationship between the EU and UK finally got under way, somewhat unspectacularly.

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In the Guardian, Rafael Behr argues that May is chasing a fantasist’s Brexit and must change course now to seek a sensible compromise – no one will be totally happy, but a brave prime minister would do what was right:

May is no grandmaster. The customs union trap was not hard to spot. To the EU she promised an invisible Irish border, and to Tory backbenchers she pledged freedom to diverge from European regulation. Those two things contradict one another. But May’s blunder was earlier, when she chose not to engage with the hidden complexities of a project made to look easy by the binary referendum question. She did not accept that there were ways to leave the EU other than the hardest. She might have considered staying in the single market, the European Economic Area or the European Free Trade Association. Those are bona fide Brexits, but better calibrated to the 52:48 people’s ratio. Instead May was persuaded that democracy demanded a formula closer to 100:0. That is the least stable compound of all … May faced a choice between a fantasy Brexit, designed only to gratify a minority who are immune to gratification, and real Brexits that require compromise on every side. It wasn’t an appealing decision, but nor was it a hard one. Still she chose poorly. It wouldn’t be easy for her to change course now. But nor is it too late.

In the FT (paywall), Gideon Rachman wonders whether Brexit could yet be stopped over the customs union question, which is so critical because it marks the frontier between a “hard” and a “soft” deal:

Some British officials surmise that the prime minister may even secretly want the Commons to vote for a customs union. Their argument is that Mrs May knows that a customs union makes sense, but that she cannot currently argue for this option for fear of provoking a rebellion by Tory Leavers. On the other hand, if the prime minister’s hand were forced by a parliamentary vote, she could “reluctantly” embrace a customs union. The danger with this Machiavellian strategy, however, is that it could backfire. Losing British sovereignty over trade policy might be a concession too far for Tory Leavers. Leading ministers such as Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, and Liam Fox, the trade secretary, are thought to be ready to resign over the issue. That could trigger a leadership challenge to Mrs May, and the fall of the government. It is this situation that led one leading British political analyst to predict to me recently that Brexit will not happen because “there is no version of Brexit that can get a parliamentary majority”. My own conclusion is that nobody really knows. There are just too many uncertainties.

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When the Liverpool manager weighs in on Brexit, and not in a bad way: