Inside The Secret Plot To Reverse Brexit

Chuka Umunna is trying to pull offthe impossible—keep Britain in the EU

- Tim Ross & Kitty Donaldson

Early each Wednesday morning, 15 people leave their homes and travel separately to a secret location in central London, where, over coffee and cookies, they plot to stop Brexit. The group includes a mix of women and men, old and young, politicians and activists, though their identities haven’t been formally released. The one idea uniting them is opposition to Prime Minister Theresa May’s plan for Britain to make a clean break from the European Union.

They’re aiming to engineer a new referendum so the British people can reconsider Brexit before it’s too late. “I do not want to see Brexit happen. I think it will destroy the futures of the next generation in this country,” says Chuka Umunna, the charismatic, 39-year-old member of Parliament who chairs the weekly gathering. “But it’s not about what I think— and shouting ‘Stop Brexit’ is not a political strategy. I want the people to get a vote.”

Anti-Brexit campaigners in the U.K. are getting organised because, for the first time since the 2016 vote, they believe they can win. Ever since May made a catastrophic gamble on an early election last June—and lost her majority in Parliament— it’s been clear she’s in a weak position to lead the country through withdrawal from the EU. In the six months after that fiasco, she’s managed to hold her ruling Conservative Party together and navigate the first phase of Brexit negotiations, albeit only after agreeing to pay the other 27 member states a £40 billion ($56.4 billion) divorce bill.