Faisal Islam, Political Editor

The Government has spent £130m on an election to lose its majority. The election was an explicit plea to strengthen "Theresa May's hand" in Brexit negotiations. Not getting a landslide and failing to increase the majority would have been quite awkward. Actually losing seats and a majority is truly catastrophic.

This is because, as I have explained before, you can run a minority government quite happily, as long as you do not have to pass controversial legislation. Brexit means dozens of such laws needing repeated Commons majorities.

There is no escaping this.

In particular there is no escaping the fact that Paris, Berlin and Brussels know precisely how much of her own political capital Mrs May has destroyed.


British negotiators are well aware about how difficult this will now make the first few weeks of deal-making. The German Foreign Minister immediately interpreted the result as a plea from the UK electorate for a different type of Brexit. Even if that were not so, it is pretty fundamental that some on the other side of the table will now consider the PM a lame duck. It was the favoured phrase of the bemused European correspondents reporting on the election from Downing Street on Friday.

With every iteration of the plan over oversight of the rights of EU nationals or the million pounds of the so-called exit bill, Brussels negotiators will ponder whether Mrs May will even be here at the next meeting. The only way to get around this is to try to build some cross party consensus. Clearly all the parties have their differences. But politics is the art of the possible.

Transparency, cross party support, democratic accountability is the best way to make up for the self-inflicted diminution of bargaining power.

Fundamentally, even with the DUP, Mrs May does not have enough MPs to sustain a credible negotiating position, particularly one that Brussels believes is a barking mad form of economic suicide for Europe's most open economy. Tory Brexiteers watched nervously for Labour results on Friday morning as their majority evaporated. There was some relief when Kate Hoey staved off the Lib Dems in Vauxhall. For every Anna Soubry or Ken Clarke, they can point to potential Labour rebels to help in tight votes.

But this is a poor imitation for the actual interpretation of the message sent by the electorate on Thursday: we want you to work together. British political culture rules out a Grand Coalition, though this is what would happen in a country such as Germany.

How else could that work? Proper consultation with the Opposition at the least, and at one extreme inviting Keir Starmer and a Scottish/Welsh/NI government representative on to the negotiating team at another. Giving Parliament an actual say on the negotiated deal. Actually involving trade experts and economists to calculate the upsides and downsides of various approaches, and publishing the sectoral assessments. And inevitably, ruling out leaving with no deal.

It is important to be clear about this. There is a decent debate to be had about whether there is a majority or not for aiming to leave the single market and the customs union. It is clear though, that this Parliament will not allow the UK to crash out of the EU with no deal. That is now fantasy with this Parliament. It might have been possible with a Conservative majority. The DUP cannot vote for no deal, however, as it would inevitably lead to a hard border with the Republic. The Labour manifesto rules it out, as does the Lib Dems, SNP, Plaid, and Green Party.

It then gets rather interesting. If you throw in everybody's desire to get a quick outcome to minimise political and economic uncertainty, then the likelihood emerges that this is likely to be in the form, for a period of years at least, of an existing legal arrangement - the Norwegian or Swiss models of EEA or EFTA membership. Diminished negotiating hands doesn't mean that Britain will be worse off, it does though reduce the likelihood of getting a specialised bespoke arrangement.

This can either happen through an iterative and painful process for the PM and Conservatives or rebellion and rejection by the Commons of harder or cleaner break forms of Brexit. It is a process that could fundamentally split the Cabinet and the party. Or they can recognise the inevitability of this eventual outcome in advance, get on top of the situation, and manage it. For the Brexiteer groupings within the Conservatives this requires some movement. Rather than there being a choice of no deal or a bad deal, the actual choice thrown up by the makeup of this Parliament is for some sort of softer Brexit or no Brexit at all, because this Parliament will not accept crashing out in March 2019.

Image: Imagine if David Davis had a broad cross-party agreement in his back pocket for negotiations...

Cross party support for some core principles, transparent publication of impact studies on sectors and of different Brexit options, would greatly enhance democratic accountability too. If the Government is pursuing an option that could endanger jobs or growth in a particular sector, then workers in that sector deserve full transparency. Clearly the engagement with business groupings on these issues, so far, has been poor, and typified by the need to parrot supportive comments to the Government rather than hard-headed analysis of what supports the economy, growth, jobs and living standards.

Transparency, cross party support, democratic accountability is the best way to make up for the self-inflicted diminution of bargaining power. Imagine if David Davis had a broad cross-party agreement in his back pocket for negotiations. Or imagine, and this is less likely, if he had actual members of other parties' front benches there too.

All of this follows on from the election result and the fact the campaign put a personalised, strengthened Brexit mandate at its heart. It wasn't that it was incompetently executed, though that is true. It was strategically absurd. It relied on the working people of the middle and North of England and Wales responding in a Pavlovian way to a robotic repetition of the word "Brexit" by voting for the Conservatives. Labour are occasionally, rightly accused, of a patronising neglect of its heartlands. But this gambit was beyond patronising.

Not all Leave voters are Brexiteers. Seventeen million people were not in the end defined by having voted this way last June, as presupposed by the Conservative's one dimensional campaign. As one Cabinet minister put it to me: "What we were proposing [on Brexit] genuinely didn't get enough buy in." There is genuine alarm in Conservative circles at the loss of seats in metropolitan Britain, London, and the M4 corridor, as well as the extra motivation given to young people to oppose the Conservative Party. It's not only Labour's core supporters who can be "left behind" and rebel against their party.

It is also entirely plausible that this election result is a harbinger of a generational fight back. Over-50s outvoted the under 40s last June. To some degree the youth hit back this June. Over time demographics are moving against Brexiteers. And 52:48 is close to begin with. Could the election result yield a Brexit compromise between Remain and Leave, across the generations, and between the political parties? It is how a grown up functioning democracy would work. And there is now, no other option.

Sky Views is a series of comment pieces by Sky News editors and correspondents, published every morning.

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