Brexit latest: General Election speculation grows as Theresa May faces more Cabinet feuding

Countdown to Brexit: 70 days until Britain leaves the EU
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Theresa May was locked in crisis talks with her own Cabinet today amid rising speculation that a general election is on the way.

The Prime Minister was hoping to identify compromises to Brexit in a series of meetings at No 10 with individuals and groups of senior ministers, revealed officials.

In a sign of the tensions, a pro-Brexit Cabinet minister went public today with a counterblast to colleagues including Chancellor Philip Hammond who say MPs should be allowed to remove “no-deal” from the table.

Penny Mordaunt wrote on Twitter that no-deal might be better, and that to rule it out would weaken Britain’s negotiating hand.

With the Cabinet and Parliament deeply divided, alarm bells were ringing across Whitehall that an impasse could lead to a snap general election.

It was revealed Britain’s most senior civil servant, Cabinet Secretary Sir Mark Sedwill, met Government department heads and ordered them to get ready for an election in case one is needed to break the political deadlock.

Yesterday, Mrs May met party leaders in an attempt to broker compromises based around the withdrawal agreement that MPs rejected by a crushing 432 votes to 202 on Tuesday.

Today it was the turn of Cabinet ministers to have their say. A battle over whether to soften Mrs May’s refusal to enter a post-Brexit customs union was at the heart of talks, along with whether the Government should try to stop MPs from voting to preclude no-deal.

Ms Mordaunt responded to a tweet from a commentator who asked why last night’s Question Time audience had cheered the prospect of no-deal.

She said “they might have judged that the upsides of leaving outweigh the downsides of staying/No Deal disruption” or that “it’s only when ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’ is believed by the EU that we’ll maximise our chance of a deal”. She said the crowd may also have felt that “not honouring the result of the referendum would be appalling”.

A powerful group of ministers including the Chancellor and Business Secretary Greg Clark are pressing Mrs May to soften her “red line” against a customs union with the EU.

Another group, made up of Brexiteers including International Trade Secretary Liam Fox and Leader of the Commons Andrea Leadsom, have made clear they are firmly opposed to abandoning the Vote Leave promise of being able to strike free trade deals outside Europe.

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In a key intervention, senior members of Mrs May’s DUP allies are indicating they would tolerate a customs union for the whole UK because that would ensure Northern Ireland would not be treated differently to the rest of the country.

In a speech at the JCB headquarters today, Boris Johnson angrily opposed a customs union, saying it would empower the EU to “snuff out” the success of British inventions by using regulations.

The former foreign secretary said a customs union would make Britain “non-voting members of the EU single market, forced to take rules from Brussels” that could ban new designs.

Countdown to Brexit: 70 days until Britain leaves the EU

“They could pass a directive and snuff that development out — just as they tried to do with Dyson vacuum cleaners — and the UK would have to obey,” he claimed. Mr Johnson was accused of burnishing his leadership ambitions by calling for careful thinking on immigration. “We know one of the ways big corporations have held wages down is that they have had access to unlimited pools of labour from other countries,” he added.

Gordon Brown used a speech in Edinburgh last night to call on the Government to extend Article 50 by a year in order to consult the public.

The former prime minister said Mrs May’s Brexit stalemate had left Britain “more divided than during the three-day week of the Seventies or during the miners’ strike of the Eighties”.

Britain was urged to stay in the EU by Angela Merkel’s likely successor and a string of high-profile Germans.

Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, leader of the Christian Democratic Union, Airbus chief Tom Enders and ex-footballer Jens Lehmann are among the signatories of a letter to the Times that says, “From the bottom of our hearts, we want them to stay,” and cites milky tea and post-work pints among the habits best-loved by German Anglophiles.