Press

By 10.15am Barclay was holding face-to-face talks with the PM at Downing Street as Labour MP Yvette Cooper - the proponent of an amendment threatening to ‘take back control’ of the Brexit process from the Government - was helpfully reminding Mrs May how high the stakes were. Addressing an audience at the Centre for European Reform, she declared that shelving the vote would be a “straight up lie” - not the first time the former minister has accused the PM of being economical with the truth following a similar outburst int he Commons in 2017.

This morning, in a big speech to the Centre for European Reform this morning, Cooper is savage about May’s ‘reckless’ approach to exit talks. But she also sets out what could happen once Parliament votes on Thursday for a delay to Brexit. She will say that May “should focus on the future partnership rather than getting stuck on the backstop”, that “she should offer indicative votes to test Parliament’s views” and “should publish a proposed mandate for the negotiations on the future partnership and let Parliament put amendments to it”. Cooper knows MPs are in the market for alternatives that could sweep May’s power away from her.

Sam Lowe, senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, says: “While there is an assumption that removing tariffs means lower prices for consumers, the evidence is far from conclusive. When tariffs go up the extra cost is usually passed on to consumers, but when they go down this is rarely the case.”

If Brexit hadn’t happened, another country would have left Europe by now anyway, a leading commentator has said.Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, said while some in Europe have dismissed Britain as ‘the pebble in the shoe’, there are plenty of other ‘pebbles’ who could take the same course.Mr Grant was speaking at the Belvedere Forum in Warsaw – a two-day event discussing bilateral relations between Poland and Britain after the UK leaves the European Union.

Charles Grant, the director of the Centre for European Reform, who follows the Brexit saga closely, said in a Twitter message that “I don’t think Cox will come back with anything substantially different — just fig leaves.”

As Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform said in a valuable Twitter thread at the weekend, the chances of Mrs May getting her deal over the line next week are rising.“This is because hard-Brexiteers are finally realising that [the] Commons can probably prevent No Deal — and if they destroy May’s deal, Article 50 will be extended, perhaps endangering Brexit,” he wrote.

“The imperative for UK food exports in the event of no deal is ensuring that they can still access their most important market, the EU,” said Sam Lowe, the trade policy expert at the Centre for European Reform think-tank.“While the temptation to fiddle with domestic regulations will certainly be there, dynamic alignment in the short to medium term is just common sense.”