Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May | Matt Dunham/AFP via Getty Images
Theresa May held her nerve in a half-hour radio phone-in with the British public.
Prime Minister Theresa May refused to confirm whether her Northern Ireland backers, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), will vote for the draft Brexit deal she is due to bring to parliament next month.
The DUP’s 10 MPs prop up the minority Conservative government in the House of Commons, but the party’s leader Arlene Foster has dismissed May’s Brexit draft as a “capitulation.”
“Well, we will see how every member of parliament is going to vote,” May said on LBC radio, when asked if the DUP would back her. “When this vote comes back every individual member of parliament will decide how they vote.”
During a 30-minute phone-in show, May also dodged the question of whether Tory MPs would be given a free vote on the deal, rather than being whipped into backing it, and she declined to comment on whether Cabinet Brexiter Michael Gove had been offered, and turned down, the vacant Brexit secretary role.
“He’s been doing a great job,” May said.
The prime minister — who faces a seemingly monumental challenge to get her deal through parliament, with Labour, the DUP, Liberal Democrats and numbers of both Remainers and Brexiters in her own party likely to reject it — remained resolute on the phone-in, where some callers accused her of failure and said she should stand down.
The final caller compared May to former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in having “appeased that foreign [EU] power,” but May reaffirmed that her deal was the best option for the country and there were areas in the negotiations where the EU had “given in to us” after the U.K. “held out.”
When quizzed about the controversial Irish backstop arrangement, however, May conceded: “I have some of those concerns myself.”
Ellen, a British woman living in Spain, called in to ask what would happen to U.K. citizens in the EU if May’s deal failed. May said she “would expect” EU countries to protect the rights of British citizens abroad just as she said EU citizens’ rights would be protected in the U.K.
Julie, who said she is disabled, called to ask for assurances that she would still be able to get the medicine she needs if the U.K. crashes out of the EU with no deal. May replied that the government was “looking at the relationship we have with the European Medicines Agency,” and went on to say that this is a “personal” issue for her, too, as she relies on insulin produced in Denmark to manage her type-1 diabetes.