David Davis has dropped the government into another crisis of credibility by saying that parliament may not be able to vote on the final Brexit deal until after the UK has left the EU in March 2019.
The secretary of state for exiting the EU made the comments in an almost off-hand way in an exchange with Labour’s Seema Malhotra while giving evidence to the Commons Brexit committee this morning. The way he said it felt as if, in the technocratic and bureaucratic world Davis now inhabits as a minister with one of the toughest briefs in Whitehall, this is merely one loose end among the hundreds involved in leaving the EU. This is a man who, as he told the committee, now arrives at negotiations in Brussels with a team of 100 civil servants. Cocooned in this world of endless specialist talks, it would not be surprising if Davis had long ago dismissed the notion that MPs will have much effect on the final Brexit process anyway.
But it’s a major failure of his political antennae if so. As the Brexit process has ground on, raising ever greater uncertainties about every aspect of national life, MPs and peers of all parties have begun to attach ever more importance to that “final Brexit vote”. In their minds it has become the big moment in the politics of the whole Brexit process. It is, they believe, their chance to decide the deal, their chance to say if it will go ahead, and their chance to exercise their ultimate power – the sovereignty of parliament. Many outside, especially remainers, are right behind them on that.
So for Davis to say that this vote could take place after 29 March 2019 (the date by which, under the article 50 process, the UK will leave the EU) makes a mockery of a role that many anti-Brexit MPs and peers see as their great responsibility. MPs are not stupid. But they struggle – as we all would and as Davis himself does – to keep on top of the complexity of the Brexit negotiations. What MPs know with complete clarity, however, is that they should have a vote and that it should be an effective one.
Davis has pulled that rug from under parliament’s feet. He will go on insisting that he has said nothing particularly significant, that it’s all a negotiating process, and that this is the sort of thing that happens in negotiations. He was eloquent with the select committee when he admitted he expected everything in the Brexit deal to be sorted in the final hour of the last day permitted, with the clock stopped. For him, the parliamentary vote is very clearly a secondary matter, since it will only take place after the deal is struck (always assuming that it is struck).
Yet in this way, he reveals a fundamental cultural clash with MPs and their self-image as a sovereign body. Politically, Davis lost it when he made his remarks. If this was a football match, the crowd would now be starting to chant at Davis, as they sometimes do to referees: “You don’t know what you’re doing.” Justified or not, it’s not a good moment for the Brexit secretary, or the process of which he claims to be master.
• Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
