Prime minister slaps down Johnson over Brexit attack

Downing Street has slapped down Boris Johnson saying he offered “no new ideas” on Brexit after he launched a fierce attack on Theresa May’s Chequers plan for leaving the European Union.In a thinly-veiled rebuke to Johnson, who claimed that the prime minister was entering negotiations with Brussels with a “white flag fluttering”, her spokesman said the country needed “serious leadership with a serious plan”.No 10’s intervention marks an escalation of the feud between the prime minister and her former foreign secretary, which has intensified since his attack on the government’s Brexit plans, widely viewed as a renewed push for the top job.Johnson used his newspaper column yesterday to accuse some members of the government of deliberately using the Irish border situation to “stop a proper Brexit”, a claim rejected by Whitehall sources.The prime minister’s spokesman said: “The Chequers proposals are the only credible and negotiable plan which has been put forward and which will deliver on the will of the British people.”He added: “There’s no new ideas in this article to respond to. What we need at this time is serious leadership with a serious plan. That’s exactly what the country has with this prime minister and this Brexit plan.”It came after Damian Green, the prime minister’s former deputy, condemned hard-Brexit supporters, such as Johnson, for having no workable plan of their own, while the former Brexit secretary David Davis said it was not the time for “personality politics”.In his article, Johnson said that the main problem with Brexit was “not that we have failed, but that we have not even tried”.Speaking on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, however, Davis seemed to attack Johnson’s agenda.Asked if it would be better if May stood down, the former Brexit secretary said: “No, we don’t need any more turbulence right now. What matters in all of this is not the personality politics, it’s the outcome at the end.” Speaking earlier yesterday, Green told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “High-stakes rhetoric, use of words like ‘surrender’ and ‘white flag’ and ‘treachery’ and so on, that some newspapers have used, are absolutely what we don’t need in the current circumstance.“What’s interesting now is that the only plan on the table is the British government’s plan. (The EU’s chief negotiator) Michel Barnier hasn’t got a plan, those in my own party who object to Chequers don’t have a plan. So let’s hear what other people have.”Green conceded that May faced “a narrow path” to get her plan agreed by MPs. “But it is absolutely certain that there is no parliamentary majority in the House of Commons for a hard Brexit. So I’ll be interested to see what those who are saying: ‘Chequers isn’t good enough, we need a much harder Brexit’, what do they propose to get through the House of Commons?”MPs return to the Commons from their summer recess today, amid growing party disquiet over the direction of the divorce talks.Johnson wrote: “The reality is that in this negotiation the EU has so far taken every important trick. The UK has agreed to hand over £40bn of taxpayers’ money for two-thirds of diddly squat.” He said that by adopting the Chequers plan, in which the UK would adopt a common rule book for the trade of food and goods, “we have gone into battle with the white flag fluttering over our leading tank”.It would be “impossible for the UK to be more competitive, to innovate, to deviate, to initiate, and we are ruling out major free trade deals”.This week will be the first chance for Conservative MPs to compare notes about the state of grassroots feeling over Brexit since before the recess. Many ordinary party members are unhappy with the Chequers plan, fearing it amounts to a loss of sovereignty.Johnson called on May to return to the argument of her Lancaster House speech of January 2017. He said that under the current plan, “we will remain in the EU taxi; but this time locked in the boot, with absolutely no say on the destination. We won’t have taken back control – we will have lost control.”