TORY Brexiteers have reacted with fury to claims that the Prime Minister’s chief negotiator with the EU is plotting to bounce MPs into delaying Brexit.
Civil servant Olly Robbins was caught spilling the Government’s entire secret Brexit strategy while drinking in a bar in Brussels on Monday night.
The hapless diplomat also seemed to suggest that Number 10 have long believed that the only way out of the chaos is through a customs union, using the Northern Irish backstop as a “bridge”.
ITV journalist Angus Walker was in the same bar as Robbins, and overhead the civil servant “speaking in such a manner that you didn’t have to listen hard to hear him”.
According to the veteran newsman, Robbins said that next month MPs would either have to back Theresa May’s deal or extend talks with the EU.
“The issue is whether Brussels is clear on the terms of extension,” he was overheard saying. “In the end they will probably just give us an extension.”
The Prime Minister has consistently said that the UK will leave the EU on March 29.
Robbins went on to say that the Government needed to make Brexiteer MPs believe that no-deal was off the table, and that if they didn’t back May’s deal then the extension to negotiations would be a “long one”.
He also revealed that the backstop was originally planned as “a bridge” to a long-term trading relationship between the UK and the EU, not a safety net to prevent a hard border.
“The big clash all along is the ‘safety net’,” Robbins said. “We agreed a bridge but it came out as a ‘safety net’.”
Those remarks have upset Brexiteers who believe it is confirmation that May always saw some form of customs union membership as the long term ambition for the UK’s trading relationship with the EU.
A Government spokesperson said: “We don’t propose to comment on alleged remarks from a private conversation. The Government’s focus is on securing the improvements Parliament needs to pass a deal so we leave the EU on March 29.”
Brexiteer Mark Francois told Sky News: “The Prime Minister has consistently over 80 times in the House of Commons said that she wants us to leave on March 29. So for her to change that would be a massive breach of trust.
“I understand privately she doesn’t want to extend it.
“That raises the question, who’s in charge? Is it the Prime Minister or is it, as a lot of us think, Olly Robbins who believes he’s the Prime Minister?”
Francois said the civil servant needed to be taken down a “peg or four”.
Earlier, May had confirmed to MPs that she could hold her key Brexit deal vote days before March 29.
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