Sign up here to receive the daily news briefing in your inbox every morning with exclusive insight from the BrexitCentral team Tory MPs ‘will move to oust Theresa May this week’ if she agrees Brexit deal with Labour… Theresa May has been warned her MPs will begin moves to oust her as soon as this week if she agrees a Brexit deal with Labour. The Prime Minister wants to sign off an agreement with Jeremy Corbyn on Tuesday in order to avoid having to send new MEPs to the European Parliament, but there is little appetite for a cross-party deal among her own backbenchers. Rivals in the race to succeed Mrs May are on a state of high alert in case a compromise deal with Labour becomes the trigger for a leadership election. Senior sources within the Conservative Party said on Monday that Mrs May will be “gone very quickly” if she moves towards Labour’s demands for a post-Brexit customs union with the EU. It comes as Sir Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 Committee of backbench Tory MPs, prepares to meet Mrs May to give her the choice of setting her own timetable for leaving office or having it set for her by her Party. – Telegraph (£) MPs to make fresh bid to oust Theresa May unless she sets resignation date – iNews …but May is set to make a final customs union offer to Jeremy Corbyn today Theresa May will today put the fate of Brexit into Jeremy Corbyn’s hands by making a final offer of a temporary customs union. She will order a trio of senior Cabinet ministers to enter the end-game in the cross-party talks with Labour, which will resume after lunchtime today. Her deputy David Lidington, Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay and Environment Secretary Michael Gove will offer three major concessions to soften Brexit. This will be a plan to stay in a comprehensive customs union with the EU until the 2022 General Election, closer alignment with the Single Market on goods and a legal guarantee to copy EU workers’ rights. But the PM is expected to demand a final response from the Labour leader within 24 hours to bring the lengthy cross-party talks to a close six weeks after they started. – The Sun European Parliament election will effectively be a new Brexit referendum, warns think-tank… Theresa May risks the European Parliament elections being treated like a new Brexit referendum, according to experts. A study by the think tank The UK in a Changing Europe said the results could have a significant impact on the outcome of a Brexit deal with the EU. The elections scheduled for May 23 are set to go ahead following Prime Minister Theresa May’s failure to get Parliament to pass her withdrawal agreement after seeking a Brexit extension to the end of October from Brussels. The report suggested European leaders might change the incentives of prolonging British membership if the Brexit Party gain a large amount of seats. The study said: “Should, for instance, the Brexit Party gain a large number of seats this may change the incentives of European leaders when deciding about whether to prolong British membership. A more fragmented and polarised Parliament might slow down the process of agreeing any future trade deal.” – Express …as the cost of staging the election rockets by £50 million The cost of staging this month’s European elections has rocketed by £50 million after Theresa May delayed preparations by insisting the poll would not be necessary. The extra cost – which is 50 per cent higher than originally thought – includes millions of pounds in “contingency” costs in case parties have to be reimbursed for the cost of fielding candidates who never get to take up their seats in the European Parliament. Brexit-backing Tory MPs described the cost of the elections as “a complete waste of public money” and said taxpayers would be appalled. The Government is expected to announce later this week that the cost of the elections on May 23 will be £156m, compared to £108.7m when the elections were last held in 2014. The biggest expense is in training and paying the returning officers and council staff who will administer the count, which will cost £96m, followed by £50m for mailing out polling cards and information about the election. – Telegraph (£) Senior Labour strategist warns against a shift to Remain after the local elections Labour’s campaigns chief has rejected the idea that disappointing local election results last week showed his party must embrace what he called “‘stop Brexit’ simplicity”. As senior Labour figures prepare to resume Brexit talks with Conservative ministers on Tuesday, Andrew Gwynne warned against a further shift towards remain. “On Brexit, what Labour is trying to achieve is much harder and more complex than those who say we need to simply swing behind remain admit,” he wrote in the Guardian. “It would be the easiest option and perhaps superficially give us a short-term boost, but we are a national party seeking support from people all over the county, unlike the ‘leave means leave’ charade of the Tories and Nigel Farage, or the ‘stop Brexit’ simplicity of the smaller parties.” – Guardian Ministers sign fresh round of Brexit contracts worth £160m with outside firms Ministers have signed £160m worth of fresh contracts with outside consultants in a bid to boost preparations for Britain’s exit from the EU. Many of the new agreements are set to run until April 2020, six months after the UK’s new date of departure from the bloc. According to data provider Tussell, nine companies that were awarded contracts last year will have them extended. Major firms Deloitte and Ernst & Young are among those listed while 11 smaller suppliers are said to have been given brand new deals. Documents published by ministers reveal companies are being paid between £3m and £6m each for services relating to IT, accounting and auditing work and management. – PoliticsHome Prince Charles to make a plea to keep links with Germany in ‘soft Brexit’ hint Prince Charles will make an extraordinary plea for politicians to maintain close links with Germany in what many will see as support for a soft Brexit. As he begins a tour of Germany with the Duchess of Cornwall he will use a speech in Berlin to acknowledge Britain’s relationship with Europe is “in transition”. But he will warn that whatever Britain and the EU negotiates, the “bonds” with Germany “must endure”. And he will express his hope that the two countries can “redouble our commitment to each other and to the ties between us”. Despite being the most politically outspoken of the royals, the speech marks a rare intervention for Prince Charles on Brexit. It comes after The Sun revealed earlier this year that The Queen had asked her family to engage publicly to promote compromise and diffuse tensions across the country after identifying it as a crisis issue. – The Sun Steve Baker: What madness is this that a Conservative Prime Minister would rather negotiate with Corbyn than deliver on democracy? The local election results are well-known to every reader here. Their interpretation and their meaning for our future actions is contested. But with such heavy losses for us, moderate losses for Labour at this stage of the political cycle and gains for independents, we should agree there is no market for political parties which fail to honour fundamental policies. For that is what our Government has done. In treating Brexit as a damage-limitation exercise, diluting the referendum result and negotiating as if on the same side of the table as the EU, we have wrecked our reputation. The task ahead is not merely to save our Party, but to save the country from political chaos through the rise of a party whose only coherent policy is single-issue protest, but which found itself at the top of polls so soon after launching. This is the scale of our failure and our challenge: we must become again a national party of government, one which looks serious about the long-term future of a major world power, the region and the world. Our immediate choices are few: Revoke and Remain, pass the present deal or find another way out of the European Union. – Steve Baker MP for ConservativeHome Nicky Morgan: If Tory MPs want May not to rely on Labour, then they know what they must do – pass her deal as it stands I don’t know much about football, but I do know that a favourite line of any football commentator is that ‘It’s a game of two halves’. And that applies to UK politics in May 2019. The question is: now we are facing the second half – namely, the European elections – what are Conservative MPs going to do to salvage some kind of positive outcome in that half? Having expected to only have one set of elections in 2019, we now have two in a month. Local elections are always closer to the hearts of most MPs and local Associations. Councillors form a huge proportion of the Party’s membership and activists. Many MPs have served as councillors and many of our professional staff have, too. So to lose over 1300 hard-working and committed local councillors, mostly because of our national political situation, is a real blow. – Nicky Morgan MP for ConservativeHome Andrew Gwynne: I’m a Labour MP, and a second referendum was a difficult sell on the doorstep Of 248 councils contested, there were just 21 where Labour lost five seats or more, and all of them were in heavily leave-voting areas in the Midlands and northern England. While you can read too much into low-turnout council elections, it is clear from the reaction on the doorstep that the talk about another referendum was a difficult message to explain to many of our traditional voters. But it is far more complex than that. Many voters see what is going on in Westminster, and it is reinforcing the feelings of betrayal that emerged as their industries disappeared. Beyond Brexit, Labour has to step up and show that our vision for rebuilding communities through investment and an interventionist industrial strategy can make a difference. If the volatility of the last few years has shown anything, it is that there can be no more tinkering around the edges. – Andrew Gwynne MP for the Guardian Tim Stanley: Both Labour and Conservatives are committing a fraud in these customs union talks We keep going round and round in circles with Brexit. Why? Because we can’t escape the technical difficulties and the parties are avoiding the only real choices they have left for themselves: leave without a comprehensive deal or stay in the EU. Instead, they talk, grandstand and play the waiting game. A case in point is the anticipated pact between the Government and the Opposition to muster support in Parliament for a new withdrawal deal. There are three basic conditions. First, alignment on single market regulation of goods. Second, keep EU rules now and in the future on things that Labour likes, such as workers’ rights and the environment. Third, some kind kind of customs union arrangement. The first two conditions are pure theatre because the Tories were always going to do them anyway. We want to sell our goods to the Europeans so, yes, we’re going to mimic their rules, plus Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn and Brussels are of one mind on a whole raft of regulatory and social issues, a philosophical convergence so profound that if you read Labour’s famous six tests for an acceptable Brexit what’s striking is how similar it sounds to the original Withdrawal Agreement that Mrs May put to Parliament months ago. National security cooperation? Tick. Managed migration? Tick. Delivers for all regions, protects rights, collaborative future with the EU? Tick, tick, tick! – Tim Stanley for the Telegraph (£) Rob Wilson: Forget a Labour deal, the Tories must reinvent themselves as the party of Brexit to survive electoral wipeout Every once in a while, I will come across a trendy revisionist arguing that William Shakespeare should be removed from school curricula and replaced with a more contemporary author. But the more I see of the rotten state of British politics today, I can only see this as a deeply ironic aim. Who else, other than the Bard, could do justice to the tragedy currently engulfing the Conservative Party? Theresa May’s Premiership, which began with high hopes and huge support amongst the public, has given way to sympathy, disdain and now real anger. Her reputation has crashed as many in her own party and wider society realise she never intended to deliver any of her early Brexit promises and has indeed spent much of the past two years reneging on them. They believe – rightly – that Theresa May is still a Remainer at heart. Reinforced by bad advice from her civil servants, the Prime Minister has been for some time in a position where she cannot and will not deliver Brexit. This has meant her premiership screams of expediency and realpolitik – survival in office is all that counts. In all of this, she has achieved absolutely nothing of note. – Rob Wilson for the Telegraph (£) Tim Ross: Theresa May’s uneasy courtship of Corbyn puts Brexit deal on knife edge According to accounts from people familiar with both sides of the negotiations, the political courtship has been uncomfortable and uneasy. It’s set to reach crunch point in a meeting on Tuesday and the outcome could be momentous for the fate of Brexit. If the talks fail, the chances of another referendum or even an emergency election will rise, while May herself could be forced out and ultimately replaced with a Brexit hardliner who is happy to leave the EU without any deal at all. In recent days officials on both sides have privately sounded optimistic about the prospects of an agreement. In part, that’s because of the generally positive atmosphere in which at least some of the discussions have taken place. Critically for the Tory side, Seumas Milne, Corbyn’s chief strategist, is said to be fully engaged and serious in the meetings that have taken place, asking detailed questions about the government’s position and the offers on the table, in a sign he’s interested in doing a deal. – Tim Ross for Bloomberg Brexit in Brief This month’s EU election will be the only three-way Brexit referendum that Theresa May needs – Telegraph (£) letters A backroom stitch-up won’t solve Brexit – Rachel Sylvester for The Times (£) Tory members’ opinion swings back against May’s deal – ConservativeHome UKIP could be about to have its seventh leader in two and a half years – Telegraph (£)