Britain's Brexit secretary resigns over Theresa May's plan to exit European Union

LONDON — The minister in charge of helping Britain leave the European Union, Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab, abruptly resigned from Prime Minister Theresa May’s government on Thursday morning, saying he could not support the withdrawal agreement approved by her cabinet the night before.

It was a stinging setback for May. Also quitting their posts were two other ministers and a junior minister in the Brexit ministry. The rapid-fire resignations sent shudders through London and E.U. headquarters in Brussels, raising the possibility that May does not have the support she needs to pursue her deal for a softer, slower-moving Brexit, a plan loaded with compromises that few in Britain like.

In his resignation letter, Raab wrote, “I cannot reconcile the terms of the proposed deal with the promises we made to the country in our manifesto at the last election.”

Specifically, Raab said he could not support May’s plan because it treats Northern Ireland’s future trading and customs relations with the European Union in a way that “presents a very real threat to the integrity of the United Kingdom.”

The resignation drew immediate derision from pro-E.U. voices in Brussels who have lamented the Brexit decision. Many Europeans have grown weary of the chaos over Brexit in Britain, where May’s own government is in constant crisis over its departure plans. 

“Who negotiated those UK terms again...? Surely the #Brexit Minister had nothing to do with it and learned of the terms yesterday.....? Oh wait,” Marietje Schaake, a Dutch member of the European Parliament, wrote on Twitter.

E.U. officials involved in the negotiations said they were focused on the current deal and that it was unclear whether they could offer any changes that would satisfy London any more.

 “We think this is the best we can do collectively with the constraints we have on both sides,” said an E.U. official briefing reporters about the deal under ground rules of anonymity. “I’m not going to speculate about any other scenario.”

 “We think we have on both sides exhausted our margin of maneuver under our respective mandates," the official said.

Shailesh Vara, a Northern Ireland minister, also quit the government early Thursday, saying that May’s deal left Britain in a “halfway house” with “no time limit on when we will finally be a sovereign nation.”

An hour after Raab quit, Esther McVey, Britain’s work and pensions minister, followed him out the door.

“We have gone from no deal is better than a bad deal, to any deal is better than no deal,” she wrote in her letter.

McVey complained that May’s proposal means handing over $50 billion in exit dues “without getting anything in return.” She said, “It will trap us in a customs union, despite you specifically promising the British people we would not be. It will bind the hands of not only this, but future governments in pursuing genuine free trade policies.”

Joining the exodus was Suella Braverman, a junior minister in the Brexit ministry, who complained that the arrangement regarding Northern Ireland threatened to break up the United Kingdom.

May is scheduled to speak in Parliament on Thursday in what will likely be a raucous session. Political opponents were quick to pounce, with some predicting her demise. 

 Paddy Ashdown, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, tweeted: “With Raab gone May becomes a gonner. With May gone the Tories will not be able to find anyone to unite behind. And so the great unraveling begins.”

The leader of the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, said May must withdraw from her “half-baked” Brexit plan.

This was “an incredibly serious situation,” tweeted Keir Starmer, the opposition Labour Party’s Brexit secretary. “The Prime Minister’s Brexit deal has fallen at the first hurdle.”

May’s supporters long suspected that her Brexit plan might lead to a couple of minor resignations from her cabinet. But her Brexit secretary? That one hurt her. 

On Wednesday night, after a five-hour meeting with her cabinet, and months of struggle and delay, May emerged from 10 Downing Street to announce that her ministers had “collectively” approved her Brexit plan.

The draft agreement, negotiated by British and European Union officials, is a decisive step toward finalizing Britain’s departure from the European Union in March.

The agreement, which has been compared to the world’s most complex divorce settlement, lays out the billions of euros that Britain will pay to leave, what rights Europeans living in Britain will have after Brexit, and how a 21-month transition period will work. 

The agreement also promises a solution to the knotty challenge of avoiding a hard border between Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom, and the Irish Republic, which will remain in the E.U.

The plan still requires endorsement by European leaders this month, which should be relatively easy, to be followed by a far more difficult vote in December in the British Parliament, where many members decry the draft deal as a weak capitulation that satisfies no one.

[A BBC reporter replaced his Brexit analysis with exasperated noises, and now he’s a hero]

Speculation mounted that there could be a leadership contest on the horizon. In order to trigger a vote of no confidence against May, 48 Conservative lawmakers have to submit letters calling for such a vote. In order to win the vote, however, the majority of Conservative lawmakers in Parliament need to vote against May. Commentators say that while there are probably enough to trigger the vote if they wanted to, May would likely win it. 

But these are fluid times.

The cabinet approval of May’s package marked the end of a remarkable 24 hours in British politics — a true cliffhanger, with social media and the airwaves filled with speculation about whether the deal, and May herself, would survive.

May barely won a disastrous election bid in 2017, securing just enough votes to govern, as long as her Conservative party aligned with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which May needs to prop up her minority government.

Sammy Wilson, a member of Parliament for the DUP, told TalkRadio on Wednesday that May’s plan “is not so much a deal as a double-cross.” 

The DUP’s chief whip at Westminster, Jeffrey Donaldson, said May’s half-in, half-out plan “doesn’t give the United Kingdom as a whole the opportunity to do free-trade deals and to take control of its own future.”

The prime minister looked exhausted as she faced the cameras Wednesday evening outside her official residence. Rather than celebrate a hard-won round in her fight for a workable Brexit deal, she sounded somber.

“This is a decision that will come under intense scrutiny, but the decision was to build a future for our country or to go back to square one and fail on the promise of the referendum,” May said, without elaborating on the details of the deal.

She described a “long, detailed and impassioned debate” within her cabinet, whose ranks are balanced between those who, like May, voted against Brexit two years ago, and those who campaigned hard for it — ministers such as Michael Gove and Liam Fox, who are committed Brexiteers.

For the past two years, the greatest debate over Brexit has not been waged between Brussels and London, but within May’s fractious Conservative Party.

Hard-line Brexiteers have pushed for a decisive split from European bureaucrats and courts, from E.U. rules and regulations, while others, led by May, have sought a softer Brexit, a compromise package that keeps Britain more closely aligned with Europe to better protect the British economy.

Michael Birnbaum in Brussels contributed to this report

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