Showdown at Supreme Court
amendment-proof in an attempt to stop mischief by anti-Brexit MPs, is designed to ensure the Prime Minister can go ahead with pressing the exit button by the end of March as she has promised.
Senior Tories insist that diehard Remainers will not be able to sabotage the passing of the planned Great Brexit Bill. “Any MP who opposes Brexit after the referendum result risks being thrown out at the next election,” a Tory backbencher told me. This week’s by-election victory by the Lib Dems in the staunch Remain territory of Richmond Park is not seen as altering the picture given the majority for Brexit across much of the country.
And while the Lords are expected to try to stall a Brexit Bill, the Upper House is not being seen as a major problem. “Peers really would be turkeys voting for Christmas if they blocked the triggering of Article 50,” the backbencher added. Mrs May has the power to create dozens of Brexit-backing peers to support her plans should the Lords prove troublesome.
YET for all the planning by ministers, nervousness is spreading among Brexiteers that the Supreme Court may prove a more impassable obstacle than expected. Some MPs suspect the 11 justices – sitting together for the first time in the court’s history in a symbol of the constitutional significance of the case – will deliver a judgment so complex that it cannot be simply overturned by Parliamentary votes. Lawyers opposing the Government have put forward an intricate argument about historic rights and sovereignty that could lead to a judgment invulnerable to being unpicked by a single, sparselyworded Government Bill. The danger is that months of legal confusion may be looming. “Voters in my constituency are getting thoroughly frustrated,” one Tory MP told me. “The country has voted to leave the EU and they just want us to get on with it. There is no patience for another round of dithering and legal wrangling.”
Such an impasse could leave Mrs May with no option than to seek a general election, some MPs believe. “She may have repeatedly ruled out going to the country early but the Supreme Court may give her no choice,” one said.
It feels appropriate that the statue of Oliver Cromwell, the champion of the parliamentarian cause in the English Civil War, gazes across Parliament Square at the Supreme Court building. Next week’s hearing must surely be among the most significant battles over the issue of who really runs the country since his day.