Politico reports:

MPs dealt a fresh blow to Boris Johnson as they voted against his breakneck timetable to pass Brexit legislation.

The House of Commons voted by 308 to 322 to reject his plan to pass the Withdrawal Agreement Bill, which turns Johnson’s Brexit deal agreed with Brussels into U.K. law, in just three days, despite a majority voting to support the deal as a whole just moments before. Too many thought three days was not enough time to scrutinize the bill, which runs to more than 100 pages.

Reacting to the vote, Johnson said he would pause the passage of the bill, reversing a statement he had made in the debate preceding the vote that if his timetable was rejected, he would pull the bill entirely and pursue a general election. [Continue reading…]

Jonathan Freedland writes:

Posing as a man whose determination would not be deflected, Johnson said that we would “definitely be leaving the EU with this deal”. But note what he did not say: he dropped his customary reference to “by October the 31st”. For all the talk of corpses in ditches, and “do or die”, it was that promise that expired this evening.

What does it mean? First, don’t fall for the hype that says that parliament approved Johnson’s deal. It did not. MPs simply voted for it to receive a second reading, some of them motivated by the desire not to endorse it but to amend it. As Labour’s Gloria De Piero confessed, she voted yes, “not because I support the deal but because I don’t”. That 30-vote majority will include MPs who wanted to propose UK membership of a customs union, others keen on conditioning the deal on public support in a confirmatory referendum. Screen out the Tory spin: those MPs should not be counted as backers of the deal.

As for the defeat on the timetable, that is the result of what now looks like a tactical misjudgment by the government. By making such a fetish of the 31 October deadline – arbitrarily imposed by Emmanuel Macron when Theresa May missed the last one – Johnson painted himself into a corner whereby even a delay of a few days looked like a humiliation. Both Jeremy Corbyn and Ken Clarke signalled that it might not need much more than a few extra days to undertake the necessary scrutiny – though Nikki da Costa, until recently Johnson’s head of legislative affairs, had said it required at least four weeks – which is hardly that long to wait. Instead of taking that pragmatic course, Johnson felt compelled to call the whole thing to a halt.

Why? The obvious explanation is that this gives the PM a pretext to grab what he really wants: an early election framed as a battle to get Brexit done, with him as the people’s tribune pitted against those wicked remainer saboteurs.

But another explanation suggests itself, too. Any period of scrutiny is unpalatable to Johnson, because he fears that the threadbare coalition that might exist to back his deal will unravel once it engages in closer examination of the withdrawal agreement. [Continue reading…]