Tory Nicky Morgan says she will not give in to ‘siren voices’ after alleged death threat

The Conservative MP Nicky Morgan has revealed she will give evidence in a court case in June after she received an alleged death threat over her position on Brexit.



She said her “absolute determination” not to “give in to the siren voices” was one of the reasons she had joined forces with David Miliband and Sir Nick Clegg in a cross-party campaign to persuade parliament to support some of the House of Lords amendments to the Brexit bill on the single market and customs union.

“In three weeks’ time I will be spending [my time] giving evidence in court against someone who sent me a death threat because I dared to vote in UK parliament … to have a final vote on the Brexit deal,” Morgan said. “That is one of the reasons why I am here this morning, sharing a platform with two politicians who have very different views on other areas of policy.”

“But what we do agree on is that Brexit is the biggest challenge we face as a country.” The court case will be heard in Walsall on 4 June.

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The trio repeated their claim that Britain was being “held to ransom” by vocal Brexiters, and indicated they would be campaigning heavily for all parliamentarians to vote for amendments to the EU withdrawal bill when it returns to the Commons.

They launched their campaign on Monday at the Tilda rice mill in Essex, one of the biggest suppliers of the grain in Britain. It has said it may have to scale back its business, which employs 250 people, if the UK crashed out of the single market and the customs union.

Miliband, the former Labour foreign secretary and now head of the International Rescue Committee in New York, denied he aimed to return to British politics, while Clegg, the former Lib Dem deputy prime minister, denied the campaign was the genesis of a new centrist party.

Morgan is one of a number of Conservatives who have backed a plan to force a vote in the Commons aimed at forcing Theresa May to soften her red lines. She said Brexiters seemed content for people to be guinea pigs in their political experiment and wanted to force their will on both the Conservative party and the rest of parliament.

“There are no precedents [for the Brexiters’ vision] so the UK has been asked to experiment on other people’s whims with a new trade policy when they have no idea what the cost will be for business and people in this country,” she said.

At the weekend Michael Gove, the environment secretary, cast fresh doubt on the prospect of a breakthrough in the cabinet deadlock on customs union proposals, saying there were “significant question marks” over the partnership being promoted by May.

The Lords inflicted 14 defeats on the government over the Brexit bill, including on an amendment to keep the UK in the European Economic Area.



Miliband said he was baffled as to why the Labour leadership was so worried about supporting membership of the EEA. “I fear the position makes Jeremy Corbyn the midwife of a hard Brexit,” he said.

He said the “onus for parliamentarians” was to support the peers who had amended the Brexit bill, arguing that voters had not voted to come out of either the customs union or the single market.

He pointed out there were other countries not in the EU that were in the customs union or the single market. “We’re stronger in close tandem with the EU, Europe is our continent even if you are not in the EU,” he said.