Jeremy Hunt warns Conservatives of no-deal Brexit political suicide

Jeremy Hunt has launched his pitch to be the next Conservative party leader and UK prime minister by saying that he could negotiate a better Brexit agreement and avoid the “political suicide” of attempting to push a no-deal exit through the House of Commons.

The foreign secretary said on Tuesday that a new negotiating team comprising of the pro-Brexit European Research Group of Tory MPs and the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist party could secure changes to the Irish backstop, the insurance policy against a hard border on the island of Ireland. Brussels has insisted that the withdrawal treaty text cannot be changed.

Mr Hunt also warned that any prime minister who tried to take the UK out of the EU without a deal would trigger a general election that would risk the extinction of the Conservative party.

“What we need to do is to have a new negotiating team. In that team needs to be not just the government, but the DUP, the ERG. I think you should have someone from Scotland and Wales,” Mr Hunt told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“If you have proper representation in your negotiating team from other voices . . . I think you can then give Brussels confidence that they are talking to someone who can deliver a deal.”

He added: “I’m worried that if we don’t solve it, we will face a political crisis that is far bigger actually than our legal relationship with the EU, it could lead to the destruction of our party system and the end of my own party.”

Echoing similar warnings from Philip Hammond, the chancellor, Mr Hunt wrote in The Daily Telegraph on Tuesday that parliament would block a no-deal exit, heralding the fall of the government and the risk of putting Britain’s “first Marxist prime minister” in Downing Street.

Given the strong Eurosceptic views of the roughly 100,000 Conservative party members who will choose their next leader, most Tory MPs expect the next prime minister to take a hardline stance.

But if a new leader attempts to leave without a deal, it could split the party and Europhile Tory MPs privately warn they could bring down the government in a no-confidence motion to avoid such an outcome.

Mr Hunt defended his comments, telling the BBC: “We must not go back to the electorate asking for their mandate until we’ve delivered what we promised we would do last time, which is to deliver Brexit; it would be absolutely catastrophic for us as a party.”

Meanwhile Diane Abbott, shadow home secretary, signalled a shift in her party’s Brexit policy, saying on Tuesday that Labour was “supporting a people’s vote strongly now because it’s the right thing to do and it’s the democratic thing to do”.

Jeremy Corbyn, Labour party leader, is under growing pressure to declare his unequivocal backing for a second Brexit referendum after the party saw its share of the vote drop to just 14 per cent in European Parliament elections.

Ms Abbott told the Today programme: “Now at minutes to midnight on these negotiations, the Tories have plunged into their leadership contest so we get no sense out of them for a few months. We think it’s important to foreground the people’s vote.”

But the Labour MP Lisa Nandy warned earlier on Tuesday that voters could rally behind no deal in a second referendum.

“I think we’ve got to wake up to the seriousness not just of what we’re about to do to the Labour party, but what we’re about to do to the country because I strongly suspect that if there is a second referendum people here would come out and vote in fairly large numbers and probably vote for no deal,” she told the BBC.