RISHI Sunak has today won a crunch vote on his Brexit deal as a rebellion led by Boris Johnson melted away.
The PM’s Windsor Framework easily sailed through the Commons by 515 votes to 29 with support from Labour, the Lib Dems and the SNP.
Rishi Sunak has won a crunch vote on his Brexit deal
Only a handful of Tory MPs joined the Democratic Unionist Party and voted against.
It is a fresh win for Mr Sunak after a well-received Budget and bagging a breakthrough pay deal with nurses to halt strike action.
But he suffered an awkward blow as three of his predecessors and a slew of Brexiteer backbenchers opposed him.
Former Tory leaders Mr Johnson, Liz Truss and Iain Duncan Smith voted against Mr Sunak’s plan to solve the impasse in Northern Ireland.
BoJo earlier said the deal with Brussels was “unacceptable” because it would leave the province at the mercy of Euro judges.
He said: “The proposed arrangements would mean either that Northern Ireland remained captured by the EU legal order – and was increasingly divergent from the rest of the UK – or they would mean that the whole of the UK was unable properly to diverge and take advantage of Brexit.”
Northern Ireland Minister Steve Baker hit back at Ms Truss and Mr Johnson, blasting the latter as a “pound shop Farage”.
Yesterday the backbench European Research Group of Tory MPs blasted the flagship “Strasbourg Brake” as “practically useless”.
The mechanism allows Northern Irish MPs to cast aside bits of EU law it does not like.
The Democratic Unionist Party also “unanimously” voted against the deal with similar reservations.
The PM and EU boss Ursula von der Leyen agreed on the historic deal to end the so-called “sausage wars” that saw two years of border chaos over goods and trade.
Goods will now freely flow into the province from the mainland unrestricted, with Northern Ireland brought back under Westminster’s tax and VAT regime.
But Euro judges will still have SOME say over trade rules in the province.
