Theresa May won’t say it, but there’s no chance of a no-deal Brexit now

The prime minister has yielded to the inevitable. It has been apparent for weeks that the majority of the House of Commons does not want to leave the EU without a deal and was prepared to assert its control to make sure that it does not happen.

Yvette Cooper, the alternative prime minister, was going to win the vote on her plan to rule out a no-deal Brexit tomorrow, so the nominal prime minister simply surrendered.

Theresa May is a politician of assertion rather than argument, so she simply asserted that the Commons would be allowed to vote to seek a “short, limited extension” to the Brexit deadline, if it refused to approve her revised Brexit deal, as if this had always been the case.

In fact it is the opposite of the government’s previous policy. It changes the choice faced by MPs: they will now have to choose between the prime minister’s deal, as revised by the attorney general Geoffrey Cox, and delaying Brexit with an uncertain outcome.

What May would not say is that a no-deal Brexit has now been taken off the table. She continued to say: “I believe, if we have to, we will ultimately make a success of no deal.” But it is not going to happen, and those Conservative MPs who want to leave without a deal are beginning to realise it.

The prime minister has finally, rather late in the day, broken with the hardcore Eurosceptics on her back benches. They will now have to decide whether they are with Jacob Rees-Mogg, who declared weeks ago that, if he could not have a no-deal Brexit, he would prefer the prime minister’s deal to staying in the EU – or with Boris Johnson, who once colourfully declared that the deal was so bad he would rather stay in the EU.

Generally, however, the hard Brexiteers were the dogs that did not bark in response to May’s statement. The fury at being betrayed, as they probably long knew they would be, seemed rather subdued. Or perhaps they realise – I admit this seems rather unlikely – that the prime minister had no choice but to bow to the will of the House of Commons as a whole, in which the no-deal tendency are a fairly small minority.

May made it explicit by saying that, if she lost the vote on her deal on 12 March, she would give the Commons a vote on 13 March on whether it wants to leave without a deal. She did not need to say that such a vote would be lost; she said merely that if it were she would then ask MPs in a further vote on 14 March if they want to extend the Article 50 timetable. She made it clear that this was not what she wanted, and she insisted it wouldn’t change the options before parliament; it would simply put off a decision. And she criticised Jeremy Corbyn for his matching U-turn on a second referendum, secure in the knowledge that there isn’t a majority in the Commons for that (yet) either.

The prime minister appealed to MPs not to vote for Yvette Cooper’s amendment tomorrow (“Tying the government’s hands by seeking to commandeer the order paper would have far-reaching implications for the way the UK is governed”), but Cooper did not sound convinced: “If there is no legislation in place, what assurances do we have that the government will abide by any votes?” she asked.

It hardly matters now.

Whether it is Cooper in charge or May, the choice is the same: MPs have to choose between the deal or delay. Either way, parliament will close off the no-deal option.