It’s the first day of a new term and a new year for MPs and peers. But, in case you missed it, Hogwarts-on-Thames really is no ordinary school. The pupils are all girding themselves for their biggest ever Brexit exam, a test so important that the head teacher has tried to game the figures by postponing it to be sure enough of them hit the pass mark. Yet with not a shred of revision (aka ‘legally binding’ reassurances) done over Christmas, everyone is expecting a re-sit. Meanwhile, the kids flicking rubber bands at the back of the class are cheerily talking about the whole school being put into special measures.
Theresa May’s Marr performance yesterday was a classic of the genre. She stubbornly stuck to her line that there is no viable alternative to her plans - while remaining Sphinx-like about what will happen should those plans be defeated. Of course, no PM is going to reveal their ‘Plan B’ before ‘Plan A’ has been exhausted, but many MPs worry that she really has nothing substantial in the locker to win a Commons majority.
Some in No.10 think that the DUP can still be won round (and with them scores of wavering Tories) in time for next week’s vote and point to the constructive approach being taken by Nigel Dodds and Arlene Foster. As one insider put it to me: “We know they need a ladder [to climb down], not a fig-leaf”. The first rungs of that ladder will be offered when the debate starts on Wednesday, but the rest may come as late as next week as May pleads again with Brussels to offer a way to bypass the dreaded Northern Ireland ‘backstop’. Brexit minister Kwasi Kwarteng this morning said a ‘time limit’ was being ‘looked at. He said ‘some of the language, some of the assurances probably need to be slightly firmer’. I think that’s called British understatement.
Just as importantly, the PM somehow needs to find her own way out of her pre-election mantra that ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’. The Caroline Spelman-Jack Dromey letter overnight, urging her to rule out a no-deal outcome, rather easily garnered more than 200 MPs’ support. The PM is indeed in ‘listening mode’, we’re told, and she has a packed agenda of meetings with backbenchers this week. Damian Green, who remains close to May’s thinking, perhaps gave the game away on Westminster Hour last night when he hinted her plan would be amended to win a second vote. “Something like” the Government’s plans would win the day, he suggested.
What may worry No.10 is the number of her MPs who are more sanguine about no-deal, as HuffPost reported on Friday. As one Leave backing former Cabinet minister told us: “We won’t be able to get certain foods like bananas or tomatoes but it’s not like we won’t be able to eat.” Today, Boris Johnson writes in the Telegraph that a WTO-exit (termed a ‘clean Brexit’ by May on Marr) is what many Leave voters really want. A new paper on WTO rules is published by the Brexiteer European Research Group today. In a HuffPost blog, Peter Lilley points out that tax and customs officials will ‘prioritise flow [through the border] over compliance’.
Jeremy Corbyn’s allies and supporters were not particularly concerned about a new YouGov poll yesterday putting the party on just 34% to the Tories’ 40%. Neither were they perturbed by the same poll finding that 75% of Labour members want a second referendum. What really seems to upset them is what they see as the strident tone of the People’s Vote campaign and the way a second referendum is used by ‘moderates’ as a stick with which to beat Corbyn. Emily Thornberry told Radio 5 Live yesterday: “I think some people within the People’s Vote movement seem to think that their purpose is to slap the Labour Party around…instead of spending their time trying to change people’s minds, they spend their time smacking the Labour Party around the head.”
What got some allies of the PM briefly excited yesterday was the hint on the leftwing blog Skwawkbox that Labour could actually abstain on the meaningful vote next week. Such a move would of course gift May her deal without DUP backing, but the cunning plan seemed to be that this would then pave the way for Nigel Dodds and his team to back Labour in a no confidence vote against the Government, sparking a new general election. Senior party sources swiftly said the plan had ‘no basis in fact’, but you can bet some MPs will want to raise this at the PLP meeting tonight.
What is true is that cross-party alliances will be crucial in coming weeks. Labour’s frontbench is very wary of promises of support from Remainer Tory backbenchers, and many MPs like Anna Soubry can’t hide their loathing of Corbyn. That’s why the role of backbench go-betweens like Yvette Cooper and Hilary Benn will be so crucial if there’s to be any Commons majority for anything (Rob Halfon and Lucy Powell team up today for a Norway-style plan too). As I wrote before Christmas, there’s a stack of Parliamentary ambushes lying in wait for the PM and this week we see the first threat of a Trump-style ‘shutdown’ of the Budget. One senior figure also told me before the festive break that cancelling February’s recess was a real possibility, and the Telegraph reports that Chief Whip Julian Smith could make a call on it today.
Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn gets a mere passing reference tonight (one sentence in fact) in the hot new political drama about Brexit, a fact that many of his critics will say itself speaks volumes. Still, Westminster will be glued to Channel 4 at 9pm as Benedict Cumberbatch plays Vote Leave’s Dominic Cummings in ‘Brexit: The Uncivil War’. I’ve seen a preview of the film and given my verdict HERE. A friend of Cummings told me he was worried the drama would make him ‘look like a massive c*nt’, so he figured that by introducing Cumberbatch to his wife Mary at a family dinner, the Sherlock actor would at least see he wasn’t all bad. See for yourself tonight whether that worked.
Also before Christmas we revealed that the long-awaited NHS 10-year plan had been delayed by the Commons chaos over the Brexit vote. Well, today it finally arrives and lots of MPs are just relieved to not be talking about the B-word for a few hours. The long-term plan, which will add an extra £20bn per year by 2023, was previewed on the breakfast airwaves not by Health Secretary Matt Hancock but by NHS England chief exec Simon Stevens.
The big headline overnight was that half a million more lives could be saved over the next decade with new prevention and treatments of heart attacks, strokes and dementia. Nigel Edwards from health think tank the Nuffield Trust said that while the plan’s aims were right “there are several big pitfalls ahead”, with the extra funding still below what experts thought was needed and a lack of key staff presenting “the biggest obstacle of all”. Ask anyone who works in the NHS and they’ll tell you more staff are vitally needed, but so too is better management and innovation. Stevens told Today he expects to save £700m in admin costs in the next five years, and it will be worth seeing the detail later.
Local Government Association spokesman Ian Hudspeth said the plan’s goals could only be fully realised if councils were properly funded to deliver social care and public health services. And the big unanswered questions on social care will remain unanswered until the Government finally publishes its green paper. Stevens hinted the cash issue had at least been resolved, telling Radio 4 that he had been led to believe that “funding of social care will be such that it won’t put additional pressure on NHS”.
Hancock couldn’t even say on Sky yesterday when the social care green paper would be published. Having been burned badly by her ‘dementia tax’ in the 2017 election, let’s see how May handles questions on this as she launches the NHS plan today. And it’s worth remembering that - as with Universal Credit (below) and other areas of policy - May simply won’t be PM any more when the NHS long-term plan really kicks in.
Watch the miss of the season by an American footballer Cody Parker last night. And watch the bear mascot slowly fall over. Cruel thing, sport.
But for Brexit, Amber Rudd’s big U-turn on the Universal Credit rollout would be a much bigger news story. The Work and Pensions Secretary confirmed the Observer’s story yesterday, via a tweet that delighted backbench MPs like Heidi Allen. Of course, Rudd was simply recognising the Parliamentary arithmetic that she probably lacked the numbers to approve new regulations moving three million more benefit claimants onto the new system. She has DWPQs at 2.30pm.
From 8am this morning, officials piloted a no-deal Brexit plan to use a disused Kent airport to hold hundreds of lorries. Chris Grayling has a written ministerial statement due, but is likely to face an Urgent Question on this and possibly other transport issues (has everyone forgotten the Drone chaos so quickly?). Other urgent questions are expected, so debates on things like the Laura Cox review of Parliamentary bullying and harassment could be delayed to the early evening.
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