May calls for Brexit talks amid fears of Cabinet split

UK Prime Minister Theresa May has ordered every Cabinet minister to come up with a personal blueprint for Brexit on how the country make a success off its vote to leave the European Union in the face of opposition from civil servants and a growing feud among ministers in charge of negotiations.

May will demand action plans from each colleague about how their department can make Brexit work at a meeting at Chequers, her country retreat, this week. The UK prime minister has also challenged each cabinet minister –more than three quarters of whom campaigned for Britain to stay in the EU – to identify Brexit opportunities in their areas of responsibility, the Sunday Telegraph reported today.

Though May has handed prominent roles to pro-Brexit colleagues in her new government, the majority of her senior ministers in charge of negotiations campaigned for Britain to remain in the European Union, including her Chancellor Philip Hammond and Home Secretary Amber Rudd.

“The Prime Minister will tell her Cabinet at the meeting on Wednesday that at the ‘top of her in-tray’ is how to make a success of Brexit and ‘the opportunities for the UK. The meeting will alow the ministers to discuss the next steps in the negotiations,” the newspaper reported.

Meanwhile, there are also concerns that the civil service is institutionally opposed to leaving the EU, and there is significant resentment of Ms May’s significant departmental restructuring, which has seen several top people moved from the Foreign Office and other departments to the new Department for Exiting the European Union and the Department for International Trade.

Despite reports of a feud between the ministers in charge of the main Brexit departments – Boris Johnson, David Davis and Liam Fox – Ms May will attempt to use Wednesday's meeting to compare the unity in Tory ranks with the chaos in the Labour Party.

The UK Prime Minister is expected to trigger Article 50 early in the new year without a parliamentary vote. The decision of May to open the negotiations to formally trigger the country’s exit from the EU will come as a blow to Remain campaigners, who had been hoping to use parliament to delay or halt Brexit.

The majority of the UK’s 480 MPs had campaigned for Britain to stay in the EU and the House of Lords is overwhelmingly in favour of Britain staying in the union, meaning that obtaining formal parliamentary approval for Brexit could take years.

The UK has two years in which to formally negotiate its way out of the European Union once Article 50 is triggered. Once it is invoked, it would be up to the European Union, and not the UK, if it wished to change its mind. Conditions of re-entry would be unlikely to be as favourable as the ones the UK currently enjoys: outside of the eurozone and the Schengen border agreement and with a large annual budget rebate.

Ms May will attend the G20 Summit in China next weekend, where she will hold informal discussions with other world leaders about the possibility of bilateral free trade deals with the UK.