Columnist says Theresa May is in ‘most impossible situation ever in history of politics’

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine has said male cabinet members should stop shouting, screaming and “waving their willies around” as Theresa May tries to secure a Brexit deal.

Vine, who is married to the environment secretary, Michael Gove, said the prime minister “has had to deal with the most impossible situation ever in the history of politics”.

“She is tenacious, she is calm, she does plough on. I think it would be quite nice if all the men stopped shouting and screaming and waving their willies around, and maybe just gave her a bit of a hand occasionally,” she told the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show.

Vine was on the programme with the Green party co-leaders, Siân Berry and Jonathan Bartley, to review the papers.

She talked about the prospect of Britain crashing out of the EU without an agreement after leaked emails showed the the Democratic Unionist party, which props up May’s government, was ready for a no-deal Brexit.

An explosive set of emails showed the DUP leader, Arlene Foster, regarded no agreement being reached as the “likeliest outcome” following a “hostile and difficult” exchange with the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier.

Vine said: “A no-deal Brexit would be a disaster … I worry about the Arlene Foster story. She is technically [the] most powerful woman in [the] country … and a no-deal is already a bad scenario, and [the] other two options are fudge[s].”

The journalist, who supported the leave campaign and has spoken positively about May in the past, said: “Everyone is focusing on May and has she or hasn’t she cut a good deal, but she is up against a Brussels that does not want us to Brexit successfully … She is really going to struggle.”

The prime minister is struggling to appease both the DUP and Brexiters in the Conservative party over a plan that could keep the UK in a customs union with the EU in order to avoid a hard border in Ireland.

The government is preparing for a key summit with European leaders. On Sunday, the former Brexit secretary David Davis called on cabinet ministers to rebel against May’s proposals. Writing in the Sunday Times, Davis said the plan was “completely unacceptable” and urged cabinet ministers to “exert their collective authority”.

“This is one of the most fundamental decisions that government has taken in modern times. This week, the authority of our constitution is on the line,” he wrote.

The Conservative MP Nadine Dorries backed Davis’s intervention and suggested he should become “interim leader” to deliver Brexit.

“His position has always been ‘change the policy, not the PM’. Getting May out and him becoming an interim leader may be the only way to deliver Brexit and [an] FTA (free-trade agreement),” she said.

Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, said parliament would be offered a “ridiculous binary choice” on Brexit.

“I think it’s false,” she told Andrew Marr. “We said we wanted a meaningful vote, and we can’t see why we should have on the one hand Theresa May’s nonsense, and on the other hand a no-deal, because that’s what they’re threatening us with.

“If she comes back with something that’s just a fudge she’s cooked up with Brussels … we’re not voting for something that’s essentially a bridge to nowhere.”