It felt like a timely metaphor. Maybe it was even a divine judgment. In fact it was caused by a humble plumbing failure from above, rather than a weightier verdict from the same quarter. Even so, few Commons leaks have triggered such lack of concern among MPs as Thursday’s decision to adjourn after a torrent of water had poured into the press gallery while Justine Greening was addressing MPs on problems facing the tax system. No disrespect is intended to the former education secretary, but the early end to Commons business will have come as a relief to MPs and much of the public alike. That’s because the stress and exhaustion that MPs feel about the Brexit crisis are now palpable. And they are very widely shared. A survey last week found that six out of 10 people think that anxiety about the crisis is damaging the nation’s mental health.
The weary and stressed national mood caused by Brexit is understandable – and likely to endure. It provides a significant part of the context for the talks that continued in Whitehall on Thursday between a government team led by David Lidington and a Labour one under Keir Starmer. Those talks have been taking place for the toughest of pressing political reasons. Only a week now remains before Britain is scheduled to leave the EU. Theresa May appears to have decided that her EU deal will not pass through parliament without securing Labour support in some way. But all sides are also aware that the longer the crisis continues, the greater the decline in public contentment with politics.
So the pressure to make a deal is very great. That does not mean – at least in this case – that a bad deal between the two main parties is better than no deal. It means that much of the public is likely to welcome a good deal, even if it involves some compromises, if such a thing can in fact be found. That will be hard, since it will have to satisfy leavers, supporters of a second referendum and an EU that is becoming visibly more twitchy about the wider effect of the failure to agree. Brexit is also an exceptionally polarising issue, where there is not much middle ground. This means a package that could satisfy everyone bar the fanatics would be extremely difficult to craft, but it is not entirely impossible if there is a shared willingness to agree.
Another pressure that is pushing the two parties out of their old comfort zones and towards some sort of bolder compromise is the inexorable spread of backbench control over parliament. Yvette Cooper’s European Union (withdrawal) (No 5) bill – which would force the prime minister to seek a new delay on Brexit – passed through all its stages in the Commons on Wednesday, albeit only by a single vote. It spent Thursday trying to win backing from the generally more pro-European House of Lords. If the bill becomes law, it will not merely tell Mrs May what to do. It will also confirm the start of a wholly new phase in the Brexit argument, in which the argument is no longer between Mrs May’s deal and no deal, as before, but is instead increasingly between the softer deal that may emerge from the talks and no Brexit.
This argument would increasingly shift the focus from the divisions within the Conservative party, where it has been for the past two years, towards those in Labour. Throughout most of the last four months, Labour has managed to avoid exposing its divisions too obviously or destructively. The party has maintained a level of voting discipline that has increasingly eluded the Tories. That could now be about to change, as Labour’s very real dilemmas and disagreements come increasingly to the fore.
This is especially true of the divide between the party’s soft Brexiters, who want to accept the UK’s political departure from the EU but retain as much as possible of the economic and trading links, and those who want a second vote on the Brexit terms in order to overturn the verdict of 2016. This will be a huge test for Jeremy Corbyn. Unless the talks produce a package that includes both softer terms and a second vote – both of which would split the Tory party – Mr Corbyn could find himself forced to make that choice too. Thursday may have ended in a parliamentary washout. But the choices are getting increasingly stark and unavoidable in both parties.
