The UK parliament was due to vote on Tuesday on the Brexit withdrawal deal: one of the biggest decisions for British democracy in living memory.
Instead, it’s going to debate an ivory bill. Specifically, it’s going to discuss what percentage of ivory in an antique pushes it over a legal limit and it can no longer be bought and sold.
European Council President Donald Tusk and British Prime Minister Theresa May meet in Brussels.Credit:AP
Why? Prime minister Theresa May realised getting her Brexit divorce deal passed had become an impossible tusk. Sorry, task.
Her deal was a white elephant. Like those antiques, too much of its content was morally objectionable for it to be worth anything.
Parliament had been promised a “meaningful vote” on the deal, and the meaning of the vote was becoming clear: “Nope”.
The business of elephants: Carvings of elephants made in an ivory tusk.Credit:AP
For a while it looked like May was taking a “damn the torpedoes” approach: bring on the crisis.
If the vote was lost, her government would have had 21 days to come back with a plan B. That would have made for an inconvenient New Year’s Eve deadline.
Instead, she ducked.
Using a rather sneaky (and to many MPs, infuriating) parliamentary procedural trick, at some point in parliament a government minister would shout “tomorrow”, which means in effect, “almost certainly not tomorrow”.
Torpedoes damned. Now what for Theresa May.Credit:PA
The vote will vanish from parliament’s order of business, and it is up to the government when to put it back on the agenda.
Despite repeated attempts during a two-hour debate on Monday, May stonewalled on giving a timetable or allowing for a deadline.
She’s off to get “reassurances” from Europe, enough (she says) to convince rebellious colleagues their fears over her Brexit deal are unfounded.
If she’s not back before December 20, the government's leader of the house later clarified, MPs will go on holiday and won’t reconvene until January 7.
It’s breathing space.
But is there any oxygen out there?
The EU will not change the withdrawal deal, it has repeatedly and emphatically said.
This may or may not be true. But the reason it insisted on the backstop that Brexiters so dislike – to keep the Northern Ireland border frictionless – will not go away and must still be solved.
Assuming the deal remains as written, May will come back at some point with an extra letter, a piece of paper she can wave at waverers, hoping to convince enough of them that their fears over the backstop are unfounded.
The longer she leaves it, the more urgency there will be about avoiding a ‘no deal’ scenario: widely expected to be a hammer blow to Britain’s businesses and economy.
Perhaps this combination of carrot and stick will change the parliamentary arithmetic.
Anything is possible.
But she has, by most counts, more than 100 MP minds to change, and even on the most optimistic outcome May will have little new leverage.
And, of course, she might not even be prime minister by Christmas. The Brexiter rebellion is growing, and today's antics added more fuel to the push to replace her with someone who would push through a harder Brexit.
May has a habit of enduring political humiliations and, indefatigably, charging on in what she sees as the country’s best interest.
But her leadership, and Brexit itself, are in utterly uncharted territory, and the March 29 deadline draws inexorably closer.
She’s asked for extra time to answer an almost impossible question.
If she comes up with an effective answer it would be some kind of political miracle.
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