4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 29 March 2019
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
With James Forsyth and Katy Balls.
Coffee House Shots is a series of podcasts on British politics from the Spectator's political team and special guests. Brought to you daily, visit spectator.co.uk/shots to find more episodes that are not released on Spectator Radio.
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0:00.0 | This is Spectator Radio, the Spectator's curated podcast collection. |
0:04.6 | The eyes to the right, 286. The nose to the left, 344. So the nose have it, the nose have it. |
0:16.4 | Unlocked. And that was John Burko declaring that the government had lost by 58 votes a vote on Theresa May's withdrawal agreement. |
0:23.6 | I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by James Versafe from the Palace of Westminster to make sense of the result. |
0:29.6 | James, ahead of this vote there was some optimism, and perhaps amongst the most optimistic ministers, |
0:35.6 | that there was a small chance perhaps the |
0:38.1 | steel might pass today. As the day wound on, it seemed that we've gone into expectation |
0:43.6 | management. So what size of defeat would be acceptable for the government to try and bring back |
0:48.6 | a vote next week? Looking at the numbers, 58 MPs voting against, do you think the deal is now dead? |
0:55.8 | Even if the government could find a procedural way to bring the deal back next week, |
0:59.4 | it's very hard to see how you turn around the defeat of this size. |
1:03.3 | Now, this is obviously one of those momentum games, which is, you know, |
1:07.2 | if they had looked like they were closer to passing the deal, |
1:10.1 | they would have been more |
1:11.1 | likely to get more Labour MPs to come across and vote for it so that makes the defeat worse but |
1:16.8 | 58 is a lot it means even if by some miracle you could find a way to square the DUP the government |
1:22.2 | would still be short 34 Tory rebels is a problem and that's simply too big a number to make up. |
1:29.3 | And just to give a breakdown of where the MPs sat here, we had a few switches from the |
1:34.2 | Brexiteers. We obviously had Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson earlier in the week. This morning |
1:38.9 | we had Dominic Rab, probably one of the remaining potential leadership candidate who had been |
1:44.0 | yet to say they would vote for the agreement. |
1:46.0 | He came out for it and there were a trickle of Brexiteers. |
... |
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