Departure of ‘three amigos’ is a sign that Tory MPs may defy the whip in Wednesday’s Brexit vote

Theresa May has emerged, battered but unbowed, from so many confrontations with one or other wing of her fractious party over the past two years that survival against the odds has become her best known political trait.

But the dramatic departure of three MPs on Wednesday, to cross the floor and join eight ex-Labour colleagues on the opposition benches, sharpened the extraordinary risks she faces in the days and weeks ahead.

Moderate Tory MPs have warned for some time that they are prepared to defy the whips – or even resign from their party – in order to ensure the risk of a no-deal Brexit is removed.

The existence of the fledgling Independent Group makes those threats more credible, by creating a safe and welcoming place for these refuseniks to go, and amplifying their arguments about the risks of no deal and the rightward lurch of their party.

May has repeatedly managed to survive potential crunch moments by winning a few more days or weeks’ grace from her exasperated colleagues.

Typically, she has done so by promising a bit more Brexit process: meetings, consultations with “senior parliamentarians”, technical talks.

That is unlikely to wash this Wednesday, with scores of her own troops, including many ministers, saying their patience has been exhausted and they are minded to defy Tory whips and vote to delay Brexit if a deal has not been reached and ratified in time for 29 March.

It looks highly likely that unless she promises to request an extension of Article 50 herself – which would enrage the Brexiters – parliament will force her to do so.

She will then face a final frantic rush to secure changes to the Brexit deal that she can put before parliament, and present her party’s rightwingers with the choice laid out by Olly Robbins in an unguarded late-night chat: back me, or your precious Brexit will be delayed, giving those pesky People’s Vote campaigners even longer to get their act together.

On that basis, she may finally – just – drag her deal over the line. But along the way, she has exasperated just about every Tory MP.

Those who know May well say that holding together the party she loves has been her guiding principle as she has navigated Brexit.

Over and again, she has flatly refused to seek the cross-party consensus the EU27 had hoped to see emerge.

Instead, she has focused on containing the contending forces on her own backbenches, believing the public didn’t vote for the “politicians’ Brexit” that would result if she tacked towards a Norway-style deal to bring more Labour votes on board.

Quick guide Tory leadership contenders Show Hide Jeremy Hunt His style is notably technocratic, with few rhetorical flourishes and an emphasis on his consensual approach and long record as a minister, notably during more than five years as health secretary, a traditional graveyard of ministerial careers. Hunt’s attempts to talk up a backstory as an 'underestimated' entrepreneur can fall flat given he is also the son of an admiral and was head boy at Charterhouse. Overall, Hunt’s approach can seem uninspiring and hard to pin down in terms of core beliefs, hence the 'Theresa in trousers' nickname among some Tory MPs – one that is more catchy than accurate (since May herself often wears trousers). In the final round of MP voting Hunt edged out Michael Gove, 77 votes to 75. Boris Johnson Johnson’s progress to Downing Street appeared unstoppable even before an overwhelming victory in the first round of voting among MPs. Most of his colleagues believe it is now all but inevitable that he will be Britain’s next prime minister. His well-disciplined campaign team will continue with their strategy of subjecting him to minimal media exposure, though once the field is narrowed down to two, the final pair will appear in more than a dozen head-to-head hustings for Tory members. The team’s main aim is simply to keep heads down and avoid Johnson creating headlines for the wrong reasons. It may not have worked. Johnson came first in the final round of MP voting with 160 votes.



After the general election of 2017, when her majority was wiped out and George Osborne described her as a “dead woman walking”, she could have succumbed to the logic of the newly hung parliament and announced a change of tack.

Instead, she ploughed doggedly on. Her allies argue that she could not have trusted Jeremy Corbyn to consistently deliver the bloc of supportive votes she needed to get a deal through.

But she could have given parliament some role in setting the parameters, in the way she is now promising to do for the next stage of the Brexit negotiations.

Instead, she scrupulously balanced Brexiters and remainers in her cabinet, spent months on an ultimately doomed attempt to keep Boris Johnson and David Davis on board and infuriated Brussels by endlessly declining to set out what future relationship Britain actually wanted.

At one point the cabinet were so divided, they were sent off into breakout groups to work on the two rival approaches to post-Brexit customs checks.

Like Corbyn, May can be tantalisingly inscrutable. Just as some Labour supporters fervently hoped Corbyn’s repeated professions of determination to honour the referendum result masked a secret desire to stop Brexit, a few moderate Tories continued to believe May was secretly a soft Brexiter, who would eventually succumb to the parliamentary logic and pivot to a customs union. But also like Corbyn, May is deeply tribal, and perhaps ultimately somewhat inflexible.

The result has been a masterclass in ducking confrontation, changing the subject and running down the clock.

Colleagues say the prime minister still retains a desire to leave her mark on domestic policy beyond Brexit, by returning to those “burning injustices” she spoke about in Downing Street.

But even if the “three amigos” are not joined by more colleagues, the mistrust sown by May’s handling of Brexit, and her catastrophic campaign in 2017, means she’s unlikely to be given the chance.

And the sad irony of her approach is that far from containing the warring factions in her party over Europe, she has overseen what is at best a splintering, but if the next few days and weeks go badly, could ultimately become a much wider split, in her party.