Article 50 trigger date - looking like 2017
Date set for Tory Leadership Decision: Fri Sept 9.
Rumours are that October 13th would be date for an emergency GE, IF one were triggered
Labour Leadership contest? FUCK KNOWS
Hastily arranged treasury select committee hearing on the implications of Brexit, has been attended by mainly Remain MPs (remember MOST MPs are Remain so that doesn't say much) plus Labour’s John Mann and Tory MP Jacob Rees Mogg.
Lord Turnbull said the government would be misguided if it notified the European Commission of a decision to leave using article 50 before Whitehall was sure what ministers were asking for.
Pressed by the committee chair Andrew Tyrie, he said it would be unwise to trigger article 50 until next year, and possibly not until the spring, though probably not later to avoid French and German officials being distracted by parliamentary and presidential elections, due in the autumn of 2017.
“What we don’t want is trigger article 50 and then for Angela Merkel to turn around and say she doesn’t want to talk to us because she has bigger fish to fry,” Turnbull said.
“It’s a lot of work to get through. A new cabinet and front bench will need to get into their jobs and then into the details of trading arrangements, what we are going to offer on the movement of people. We are not going to get all we want on one and not make a concession on the other,” he said.
Turnbull said he supported basing the Brexit team in the cabinet office, but argued that Oliver Letwin should only be a stop gap head of the negotiating team.
“The government has started building an apparatus and I think it’s in the right place in the Cabinet Office. At the moment it is under the charge of Oliver Letwin, who I think is completely unsuitable in the longer term. He has spent the last six years as a kind of consigliere of the prime minister. He has been absolutely at the heart of No 10. And that is not the profile needed for carrying its work forward.”
He said it needed someone committed to the cause of Brexit.