Facing a Brexit delay? PM May renews efforts for deal change

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (Reuters) – Prime Minister Theresa May faces a growing threat that she will be forced to delay Brexit, a move that risks a showdown with eurosceptics in her Conservative Party just weeks before Britain is due to leave the European Union.

With Britain’s Brexit crisis going down to the wire, May is struggling to get the kind of changes from the EU she says she needs to get her divorce deal through a deeply divided parliament and smooth the country’s biggest policy shift in more than 40 years.

In Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh for an EU/Arab League summit, she met the bloc’s leaders to try to win support for her efforts to make her deal more attractive to parliament, where frustrated lawmakers are gearing up to try to wrest control of Brexit from the government.

Her decision to push back a vote on her deal into March, just days before Britain is due to leave, has prompted lawmakers to step up attempts to stop a no-deal Brexit, a scenario many businesses say could damage the world’s fifth largest economy.

Several of their plans would involve extending Article 50, which triggered the two-year Brexit negotiating period, delaying Britain’s departure beyond March 29 – something May has said would only delay an inevitable decision.

The EU has said it will consider an extension to the Brexit process, but only if Britain can offer evidence that such a delay would break the deadlock in parliament, which resoundingly voted down the deal last month in the biggest government defeat in modern British history.