No 10 insists PM will stick to late change to Brexit promise

Downing Street has insisted Theresa May will stick to her plan of giving parliament a limited meaningful vote on a final Brexit deal, as a number of rebel Conservative MPs accused the government of going back on its promises over the issue.

Antoinette Sandbach said it was extraordinary that a government amendment to the EU withdrawal bill appeared to have been changed at the last minute, something the MP for Eddisbury said had been prompted by the Brexit secretary David Davis’s department.

Stephen Hammond, another Tory rebel, said he trusted May but felt she had been poorly advised or even forced into making the change.

Dominic Grieve, the former attorney general, whose compromise amendment on a final vote the rebels believed had been largely accepted, said he had only found out this was not the case immediately before the government’s version was published.

But No 10 said the government amendment put forward late on Thursday would remain in place. The amendment will be debated and voted on when the bill returns to the House of Lords on Monday, with MPs addressing the matter again on Wednesday.

May’s spokeswoman said: “The prime minister listened to those across the house who called for the ability to express their view in a no-deal scenario, and we’ve put forward an amendment which will be debated next week.”

The row centres on the final element of a change to the bill proposed by Dominic Grieve, which sought to give MPs the power to direct government on the next steps if a final Brexit deal was voted down and there was the prospect of a no-deal departure from the EU.

The rebels believed May had offered them this amid frantic talks before a vote about a Lords amendment on the same subject on Tuesday, which headed off a rebellion. But some have since said they felt betrayed by the eventual government version of the amendment.

Sandbach said that in the hour before the amendment was tabled, Davis’s department “appeared to get involved and the process was hijacked and one was tabled that wasn’t agreed to”.

She said: “|There was no discussion, no notification. It’s extraordinary. I’d like to see grownup government and it seems to me that DExEu is trying to reduce parliament to a school debating chamber.

“I hope there’s open dialogue before Monday and I hope the government comes to its senses.”

Hammond said he also hoped to see compromise. “Other people in the government may have either advised her badly or tried to force a statement on the prime minister,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

May’s spokeswoman rejected the idea that the prime minister had gone back on a deal, saying: “I wouldn’t get into the private conversations that the PM has had with colleagues this week, but our amendment deals with each of the three elements in Dominic Grieve’s amendment.”

Grieve had negotiated what the rebels thought was a compromise to answer the criticism that parliament could not bind the government, while still allowing a substantive vote. When he left to appear on BBC1’s Question Time on Thursday afternoon he was convinced the deal was done.

On Friday, Grieve said the difference between what he believed had been agreed and the eventual government amendment were “very small but very unfortunately very significant”, and that he had been surprised by the changes.

“The reality is that when the negotiations finished I understood that we were in agreement. The fact that disagreement existed was communicated to me about two or three minutes before the government eventually tabled their amendment. And that’s really not satisfactory,” he told Sky News.

When the amendment was finally published shortly after 5pm, the meaningful vote the rebels thought they had won had been watered down, so that in the event of a deal not being reached by January 2019 the government would make a statement about its plans and the Commons would be invited to vote on a “neutral motion” to take note of the statement. Such a motion could not be amended.

Grieve said he hoped the matter could be resolved without a rebellion on Wednesday: “If necessary I will vote against the government, if I don’t think we have a satisfactory means of resolving the problem of it we have a no deal Brexit. But that depends on whether the government is prepared to engage.”