Like the white queen in alice in wonderland, may expects us to believe six impossible things | thearticle

As the story of Brexit approaches its denouement, Theresa May increasingly resembles a character from Lewis Carroll. In _Alice Through the Looking Glass_, the White Queen admonishes Alice

for refusing to believe “impossible things”. “Why,” says the Queen, “sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” The Prime Minister now expects her colleagues

and, more importantly, the country to believe at least six things that are, if not impossible, then extremely improbable. The first is that she will win the Commons vote on the Withdrawal

Agreement: almost nobody believes that, including her. The second is that she will lose the vote, but not by enough to destroy what is left of her authority: the likelihood is that she will

lose by at least 100 votes, which would have been enough to force any of her predecessors to resign immediately. The third is that in the event of such a defeat, the EU would allow Britain

to leave with no deal rather than offer concessions: almost everyone else expects at least cosmetic ones. The fourth is that there can be no question of begging Brussels for an extension

beyond the end of March: EU officials are braced for just such a request, perhaps even this week. The fifth, articulated in a speech she is giving today in Stoke-on-Trent, is that the most

likely result of voting down her deal is that Britain will remain in the EU. No-deal, in which the UK would leave on WTO terms, is still the default option, assuming the March deadline

applies, and there is still no majority for the second referendum that would be required for Brexit to be cancelled. The sixth, but by no means the last, is that she is still in full control

of Brexit. The now notorious conversation overheard in the Commons gentlemen’s cloakroom by the Chief Whip, and reported yesterday in _The Sunday Times_, suggests that a cross-party

alliance of MPs were plotting to seize control by changing the rules so that Government motions would no longer automatically take precedence over backbenchers’. Abolishing Standing Order

14, with the Speaker complicit, would amount to “a very British coup” and enable a committee of MPs to steer the process towards a softer Brexit, ruling out no-deal and perhaps engineering

the “People’s Vote” that many of them favour. Mrs May warns that for Parliament to cancel Brexit, ignoring the result of the referendum, would be just as dangerous as the opposite scenario:

“What if we found ourselves in a situation where Parliament tried to take the UK out of the EU in opposition to a Remain vote?” She is right about that, but most MPs voted Remain and don’t

have enough imagination to put themselves in the predicament of Leave voters who feel frustrated by the machinations in Westminster. There are voices of sanity in the midst of chaos. Rory

Stewart points out that if there is no majority in the Commons either for no-deal or for a second referendum, then a deal very like Mrs May’s is inevitable. He asks: “Why are we going round

in circles?” Sir Edward Leigh, one of the most experienced of the Brexiteers, is reported to have come to the same conclusion. Yet the problem persists that the Withdrawal Agreement is not

really Brexit, because it keeps Britain inside the Customs Union indefinitely and hence still subject to the EU. So the 52 per cent — more than 17 million people — are bound to feel betrayed

even if some version of Mrs May’s deal does pass the Commons. It doesn’t help that the Leader of the Opposition believes many more impossible things before breakfast than the Prime

Minister. On Brexit he is just plain ignorant. Jeremy Corbyn still doesn’t know the first thing about it: he has just revealed that he thinks the European Court of Human Rights is “in part

an EU institution”. It isn’t. And for that reason Britain would still be subject to the ECHR even after Brexit. Tomorrow’s vote will be a great parliamentary occasion, perhaps even an

historic one. But it won’t get the rest of us off the hook. By constitutional convention, we are supposed to be governed by “the Queen in Parliament”. What this means is that Parliament

alone is not sovereign, but that the powers of executive and legislature are fused in Parliament, with the Sovereign delegating her authority to the Government, led by the Prime Minister,

which in turn depends upon commanding a majority in the House of Commons. It is a mystery comparable in complexity to the Holy Trinity. Depending on its result, the vote will have

consequences that may pose the constitutional question: by whose authority are we governed?