Brexit: May faces Tory fire as Hammond blasts Boris Johnson

Bloomberg

Prime Minister Theresa May faces the battle of her political life to retain control of the governing Conservative Party as top Tory politicians undermined her leadership.
After arch rival Boris Johnson went for the jugular, Chancellor Philip Hammond swept in to defend her in an increasingly chaotic political scene.
May arrived at her party’s annual conference in Birmingham needing to reassert her authority and to convince Tories to back her blueprint for Britain’s departure from the European Union. Johnson, her top diplomat until three months ago, called her plan “deranged.”
The next few days will be critical, and her political opponents have an advantage that she doesn’t address delegates herself until Wednesday.
May’s proposal to keep close to the EU’s single market in goods—which would establish a new free trade area with the UK—has been bluntly rejected by European leaders, and is under attack from euroskeptic Tories led by Johnson who want a quick, clean split from the bloc. Johnson has been criticizing May’s so-called Chequers plan for months, but he turned it personal in an interview with the Sunday Times. Her idea to require Britain and the EU to collect each other’s tariffs was “entirely preposterous,” he said.
“Unlike the prime minister I fought for this, I believe in it,” Johnson said. “I think it’s the right thing for our country and I think that what is happening now is, alas, not what people were promised in 2016.”

Broadening Attack
It wasn’t just May coming under fire. Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, former Brexit Minister Steve Baker said May’s blueprint is the product of “excessive political influence’’ by the country’s biggest business lobby, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). “The CBI is a grave menace to the political stability and economic prospects of the UK,’’ Baker wrote. “The voice of business should be heard. Companies are entitled to seek minimal interruption to commerce and, as the party of free enterprise, Conservatives should listen. But the CBI is not that voice.’’

A Period of Silence
May has her cheerleaders. Earlier in the day Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservatives, told the BBC that “in terms of a period of silence, I would be very welcoming of one.”Ahead of his speech on Monday, Hammond got uncharacteristically personal—against Boris Johnson. He predicted the former London mayor would fail in a leadership bid.
Hammond mocked Johnson’s cut-glass British accent and accused the former foreign secretary of being unable to grasp details, in an interview published on Sunday night with the Daily Mail newspaper.
He defended Theresa May’s Brexit negotiating approach, while arguing Johnson’s own plan would never work because it would split Northern Ireland from the rest of Britain, which could in turn prompt demands from Scotland for a hard border there.