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Since passage of the WA Implementation Bill is a precondition of ratifying and bringing the WA into force, and since that could not plausibly be done in 17 days, it is now beyond doubt that (absent a crash out) 29/3 is not going to be the day the U.K. leaves the EU.
Any continued insistence by the PM that 29/3 is going to be Brexit day would be hard to reconcile with the incontestable facts.
Some further - more contestable - observations. It has been obvious for some time that the PM’s tactic (“strategy” is perhaps too kind) is to run down the clock so that her WA is the only alternative to “no deal”.
But if Parlt ends up voting for the WA with a gun to its head then getting the WA Implementation Bill through the HoC is likely to be very fraught. And 1st July is going to be very hard to shift as a backstop deadline (at least absent a real prospect of Remain).
The crisis and uncertainty won’t be over.
But, worse, even if that hurdle is jumped there is a serious risk that the WA and political declaration, and the legislation implementing them, will lack any domestic legitimacy, either in the HoC or in the country.
Instead, they will be seen - by all sides - as an illegitimate stitch-up by the PM: no more legitimate as a source of obligations than a promise obtained under duress.
If so, the poison that Brexit, and the PM’s chosen method of implementing it, have injected into our national life won’t be drawn this summer: the paralysis and other pathologies that they have caused will persist well beyond this PM’s likely term of office.
