Greening tells MPs to get their heads out of the sand on Brexit

Justine Greening made the comments as she joined campaigners delivering a petition for another referendum to Downing Street.

She said she would vote against Theresa May’s deal in the Commons, and instead called for a People’s Vote on the final deal.

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Greening joined dozens of campaigners and MPs from three other parties to deliver the petition – signed by more than a million people.

She said: ‘I think that MPs need to take their heads out of the sand and recognise that Parliament isn’t going to vote for any of the options on the table but in that case we can’t just decide to disagree and go nowhere – we have a responsibility to find a route through for people in our country.’

Greening added: ‘In the end I expect MPs to get to that point when they do see gridlock and realise that actually we are going to have to go back to the people, and maybe that’s also for the best: asking people surely is a sensible thing to do in a democracy when it’s a question this big.’

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Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable said the ‘let’s just get on with it’ attitude is a ‘fallacy’, because ‘even if we accept the government’s deal we’re not just getting on with it’.

‘We’ll be spending years in negotiation of what kind of arrangement we’d want with the European Union – the problem isn’t going to go away.’

Green Party co-leader Caroline Lucas predicted that there was a ’70 or 80%’ chance of a People’s Vote because ‘there’s no majority behind anything else in Parliament’.

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And she said: ‘This idea that the ‘will of the people’ is some kind of static thing that never changes is just wrong: the will of the people has changed, it can change and she needs to listen to that.’