Sign up here to receive the daily news briefing in your inbox every morning with exclusive insight from the BrexitCentral team Theresa May set to announce departure date today with Tory leadership contest formally to begin on 10th June… Theresa May will today clear the way for Britain to have a new prime minister by the summer. Allies said that – barring a last-minute change of heart – she will announce plans this morning to step aside as Conservative Party leader next month. Mrs May will begin the day with a meeting with the Tories’ backbench shop steward Sir Graham Brady to discuss the exact timetable for her departure. She is then expected to address the nation from Downing Street to explain why she is leaving ‘the job I love’ before she has realised her ambition of leading Britain out of the European Union. Mrs May is expected to try to delay the start of the Tory leadership race until the week beginning June 10, to allow her to host Donald Trump’s state visit without the indignity of her MPs voting on her successor at the same time. – Daily Mail Time finally runs out for Theresa May – The Times (£) Theresa May to lay out a timetable to quit within weeks in last-ditch bid to pass Brexit deal – The Sun …as her day of destiny arrives after Jeremy Hunt and Sajid Javid withdraw support for Brexit Bill… Theresa May must finally confront her own destiny on Friday after Jeremy Hunt withdrew his support for her last-chance Brexit bill. In a pivotal meeting on Thursday the Foreign Secretary made it clear to the Prime Minister she must abandon the deeply unpopular plan on which her hopes of survival rested. Mrs May had agreed to announce the timetable of her departure after a vote on the Brexit “divorce” bill next month, but after she cancelled that vote her reason for remaining as Tory leader also fell away… Mr Hunt, the Foreign Secretary, told her to pull the Withdrawal Agreement Bill altogether, leaving Mrs May facing a collapse in Cabinet support after the resignation of Andrea Leadsom on Wednesday night. Mr Hunt made it clear to the Prime Minister that “loyal colleagues” should not be forced to go through the voting lobbies to back the Bill. Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, made it clear in a separate face-to-face meeting he could not vote for the Bill in its current form. – Telegraph (£) Jeremy Hunt urges May to kill off her bill in another blow to PM’s authority – Independent …which will not be published today after all, nor debated when MPs return from their recess Theresa May’s Brexit withdrawal bill will not be published or debated until early June, the government says… Mrs May had told the Commons that the Withdrawal Agreement Bill – the legislation needed to implement the agreement between the UK and EU – would be published on Friday so MPs would have “the maximum possible time to study its detail”. Mrs Leadsom had been due to announce when it would be introduced to Parliament on Thursday, but resigned on Wednesday night. Standing in for her, government whip Mark Spencer told MPs: “We will update the House on the publication and introduction of the Withdrawal Agreement Bill on our return from the Whitsun recess.” He added that the government planned to publish the bill in the first week of June. “We had hoped to hold second reading on Friday 7 June,” he added. “At the moment, we have not secured agreement to this in the usual channels. Of course we will update the House when we return from recess.” – BBC News MPs couldn’t stop No Deal under new prime minister, Tories warn A new prime minister could trigger a no-deal Brexit without parliament having the power to stop it, senior Conservatives are warning colleagues. In a stark message to MPs, supporters of Theresa May’s deal have said that if Boris Johnson or Dominic Raab were elected to succeed her then the House of Commons could be sidelined from the process of leaving the European Union. They have been backed by the Institute for Government, a Whitehall think tank, which said that although MPs could express an opinion they would not have “legal teeth” to stop a no-deal Brexit. Under UK law, enacted by last year’s EU Withdrawal Act, Britain will leave with or without a deal on October 31 unless the date is changed by the government or Article 50 is revoked. – The Times (£) Up to two million EU citizens living in the UK ‘may have been denied the chance to vote in European election’ Up to two million EU citizens living in the UK could have been denied the chance to vote in the European elections because of councils’ failure to register them in time, a campaign group warned on Thursday. Thousands went on social media under the hashtag #deniedmyvote to complain that they had either been turned away from polling stations or barred from voting because of delays in registering them. Britons overseas claimed they had been denied a vote because councils did not send them their postal voting ballots. One EU voter from Lithuania turned up at her polling station in Oxford only to be told that she had not returned the necessary form which she said she had never received in the first place. – Telegraph (£) Tory ‘big beasts’ including Boris Johnson will lose their seats at the next election if Brexit Party surge continues, new analysis reveals Boris Johnson, Amber Rudd and other Tory “big beasts” would lose their seats at a general election if support for The Brexit Party continues at anything close to its current level, new analysis has suggested. The Conservative Party would suffer “devastating losses” of as many as 113 seats if Nigel Farage was able to secure 30 per cent of the vote at a general election. But even if Mr Farage’s party won 15 per cent of the vote it would still likely be “game over” for the Tories’ chances of forming the next government because they would potentially lose as many as 67 seats. Professor Matthew Goodwin from the University of Kent who conducted the modelling said “everything now hinges on whether the Conservative Party can deliver a meaningful Brexit” because it is mostly “disillusioned Tories” who are fuelling Mr Farage’s surge in the opinion polls. – Telegraph (£) Jean-Claude Juncker slams British politicians for kicking out May while Brexit is still in the balance Jean-Claude Juncker has attacked British politicians for obsessing more over ousting Theresa May than securing a good outcome on Brexit. The Brussels boss said he was “getting fed up” of the turmoil in Westminster and warned a second referendum might not be the best way forward. Instead he told MPs it’s their “patriotic duty” to back the PM’s deal and end the uncertainty which is “harming” both Europe and the rest of the world. The Commission chief’s blunt intervention came as chaos gripped Downing Street, with Mrs May’s premiership seemingly falling apart at the seams. He fumed: “What I don’t like in the British debate is it seems more important to replace the Prime Minister than to find an agreement among themselves. We have to stop this process because it’s harming the general atmosphere in Europe. It’s harming growth perspectives worldwide.” – The Sun Disaffected voters boost Brexit Party across North West As the glitterball twinkled and the raffle table heaved with prizes in a Lancashire pub in the former mill village of Bamber Bridge, Margaret West was feeling happier than she had for months. The Blackpool rock‘n’roll dancer and former education worker had been so angry and stressed over Brexit she’d lost sleep over it, felt ignored by politicians and unfairly insulted online for voting to leave. But then something came along that made her feel represented, “that gave me a sense of excitement, something new and worthy like the Suffragette movement”, she said. It was Nigel Farage’s Brexit party. West had never been involved in politics and had voted Labour before switching to Conservative. Now she is one of more than 100,000 Brexit party supporters who donated online, put stickers in their windows and went to Farage’s roadshow rallies. At this Brexit party pub night south of Preston, supporters were looking ahead to planning a Westminster election campaign. “It’s like being swept up on a tide,” West said. “There’s such a great atmosphere. I’ve never been to the football but when Nigel walks out at a rally, I imagine that’s the feeling you get when your team scores a goal.” – Guardian Michael Fallon: Thatcher didn’t cling on like this. We need a Brexiteer to lead us out of this paralysis It’s nearly 30 years ago now but none of us who were there will ever forget the quiet dignity of Margaret Thatcher’s final days in office. From the moment she won – won! – the first leadership ballot, through that dreadful Wednesday, and on to her triumphant final speech as Prime Minister in the confidence debate the following day, it was impossible not to be moved by her grace and poise. She had to go, not because she fell a few votes short of the ballot threshold, but because in the end she had lost the confidence of her colleagues. When your own Cabinet tells you that your time is up, it is. Theresa May’s time is up, and the sooner she goes the better. Of course she should have gone earlier, after losing the first or second Withdrawal Agreement votes, or perhaps even earlier when only the payroll saved her in the December leadership challenge. That would have given a new leader time to rework the Agreement and might have spared us the terrible local election losses this month and the European election results to come. Clinging to office has diminished her and destroyed any remaining value in her legacy. – Sir Michael Fallon MP for the Telegraph (£) Hugh Bennett: The Brexit Party’s looming success will expose the EU’s own contradictions It was the election that was never meant to be held, the party that was never meant to exist, the comeback that was never meant to happen. But happen it has, and the consequences will be felt acutely in Brussels, as well as Britain. Not least because, as Yanis Varoufakis bemoaned earlier this week, on the basis of current polling, the Brexit Party have a good chance of becoming the largest single national party in the European Parliament. On one level this will be a slap in the face for the Euro-elite – from conceited Lib Dem activist Guy Verhofstadt and insolent Change UK supporter Donald Tusk to Manfred Weber, the sneering frontrunner to succeed Jean-Claude Juncker, who could see his German CDU/CSU party pushed into second place behind the Brexit Party. – Telegraph (£) Sean Walsh: An “advisory” referendum is just as binding as a “legal” one So, the Nanny in Chief has decided to throw everything on the capricious mercies of the Commons kindergarten in order to get her “deal” (which isn’t a deal) across the “line” (which with magnetic precision recedes when she approaches it – she’s a reverse “Iron Lady” in that limited sense). She will lose for the following reason: that her premiership has now experienced the fatal deterioration: from contempt to pity. And from pity to laughing- stock. The acolytes will claim that she has not actually offered a second referendum. And the acolytes are strictly speaking correct. Of course, she hasn’t. But she has, in that “speech” on Tuesday managed to do the impossible: bore a crowd of accountants while alienating the people who were well disposed to her. All five of them. – Sean Walsh for Comment Central The Sun: Britain does not have time for Theresa May’s stalling over Brexit — she must go Britain does not have time for Theresa May’s stalling. The game is up. She will not be the Prime Minister who delivered Brexit. Her deal will not pass no matter how much she tweaks it. The Sun has plenty of sympathy for her. Brexit is a gargantuan task she has stuck to through thick and thin. She has tried to uphold our democracy against all those willing to undermine it. But she has made terrible misjudgements, broken too many promises, lacked basic communication skills and made desperate and suicidal compromises as failure began to look inevitable. She has lost the trust of her Cabinet, her party, the Commons and the electorate. The country is barely being governed at all. Westminster is paralysed. We cannot wait months before Mrs May finally chooses to go. We need new leadership now. – The Sun Brexit in Brief The demise of Conservative leaders – John Redwood MP for Comment Central Tory predicts Brexit turmoil to leave party with zero MEPs – Express