Theresa May will urge MPs on Monday not to “break faith with the British people” by demanding a second referendum, as she faces intense pressure to give parliament a say on Brexit before Christmas.

The prime minister will make a statement to MPs on last week’s European council summit in Brussels, from which she returned with little evidence of progress in securing legal reassurances on the Irish backstop.

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Jeremy Corbyn will take the opportunity to call on her to hold a vote on her Brexit deal this week, and senior Labour figures refuse to rule out an imminent no-confidence motion if she fails to do so.

May, however, will use her appearance at the dispatch box to strongly reject the idea of a second referendum after Downing Street was forced to deny reports on Sunday that some of her key aides were secretly considering the idea.

“Let us not break faith with the British people by trying to stage another referendum,” the prime minister will tell MPs. “Another vote which would do irreparable damage to the integrity of our politics, because it would say to millions who trusted in democracy, that our democracy does not deliver. Another vote which would likely leave us no further forward than the last.”

Her message is aimed partly at Conservative MPs, and some ministers, who have become increasingly convinced that a referendum is the only way out of the impasse at Westminster after the prime minister abruptly pulled plans for a vote on her deal last week.

She also faces growing demands from within cabinet to present MPs with alternatives in non-binding indicative votes that might help to find options that could command a majority.

The education secretary, Damian Hinds, who proposed the idea in a cabinet conference call last week, suggested on Sunday there would be “a value in, sort of, flushing out, what these various different options are”.

He believes there are several proposals, including a Norway-style deal, which are enthusiastically backed by some MPs but would not command a majority.

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The international trade secretary, Liam Fox, has also hinted he would support a series of free votes. “Personally I wouldn’t have a huge problem with parliament as a whole having a say on what the options were,” he told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show.

He suggested the plan was “not one that cabinet has discussed yet, but, when you look at the options that we have, you’ve got to recognise that there a limited number of real-world options here”.

Fox also underlined his belief that MPs would not accept a deal without a mechanism to reassure MPs that the UK would not be trapped permanently in the backstop.

“Clearly, if there’s no reflection of the anxieties that MPs have had about potentially being locked into the backstop without any choice it’s unlikely to pass in parliament,” he said.

May has summoned a group of broadly supportive cabinet ministers for a meeting on Monday morning. Several, including Amber Rudd and David Gauke, are preparing to reiterate the call for a series of votes in parliament as soon as possible to test support for alternatives to the prime minister’s deal.

“At this stage, it’s all about taking options off the table,” said one cabinet source, comparing breaking the current impasse with the task of peeling “a very elaborate onion”.

Downing Street, however, is sceptical about the idea, fearing it would be inconclusive and confusing. May is determined to persist with her strategy of seeking legally binding reassurances on the Irish backstop, and bring her deal back to parliament before 21 January in the hope the Christmas break focuses MPs’ minds.

She pledged to bring back legally binding changes to the backstop at the make-or-break meeting of the 1922 Committee of backbenchers last week, before Tory MPs voted in the no-confidence ballot on her leadership.

May survived the bid to dislodge her, orchestrated by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s pro-Brexit European Research Group, but many colleagues felt the 117 votes against her further undermined her authority and strengthened the hand of her cabinet in shaping events.

“It wasn’t her that decided to pull the vote, it was us,” pointed out one cabinet minister. “I have always believed in cabinet government.”

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May’s chief of staff, Gavin Barwell, sent a series of tweets on Sunday morning denying reports in two Sunday papers that he had told colleagues a fresh referendum was the only way through the Brexit crisis.

In response to the Harlow MP, Robert Halfon, who said calling another referendum would be a “complete betrayal” of the prime minister’s promise to respect the 2016 vote, Barwell agreed. It would “further divide the country when we should be trying to bring people back together”, he said.

Sources close to David Lidington, May’s de facto deputy, also strongly denied he had signalled in a meeting with Labour MPs last week that Downing Street was interested in the option of a referendum, insisting he had been in “listening mode”.

May’s reluctance to hold a second referendum put her in rare agreement with her former foreign secretary, Boris Johnson. In his column in Monday’s Telegraph, he said the public would be “utterly infuriated” if Britain were to be put through the “misery and expense” of another referendum.

However, the former Labour foreign secretary Margaret Beckett said: “It is highly significant that Downing Street felt it had to issue these advance extracts of Theresa May’s statement to the House of Commons on Sunday night, because officials know the prospect of a people’s vote is being discussed, not just in Westminster, but in the corridors of Whitehall, too.

“The case for the public being given the final say is becoming so overwhelming that people from all parties, and of none, now recognise that this is the best way forward for our country.”

May was also drawn into an embarrassing spat with Tony Blair on Sunday, after he rejected her claim that he had insulted the prime minister’s office by touring Europe trying to stop Brexit.

“For Tony Blair to go to Brussels and seek to undermine our negotiations by advocating for a second referendum is an insult to the office he once held and the people he once served,” May said.

Blair hit back, saying he would continue to speak out because he believed the prime minister’s deal was not in the national interest.



