Theresa May's Cabinet have backed her Brexit deal amid reports of an imminent leadership challenge

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Theresa May

• Theresa May's Cabinet has backed her Brexit deal after ministers discussed it at length during a five-hour meeting.
• The deal has caused outrage from pro-Brexit Conservative MPs who threatened to oust the prime minister if she pushed ahead with the deal.
• The draft agreement, reached between EU and UK negotiators on Tuesday, will now pass to the EU council later in November where the EU's other 27 countries will be asked to approve it.
• Once approved by the EU, the deal will return to the UK parliament in early December, where May will face a tough battle to win the approval of MPs.
• However, rumours are mounting in Westminster of an imminent challenge against May's leadership by Brexiteer Conservative MPs.

LONDON - Theresa May's ministers have backed her Brexit deal with the EU after a mammoth meeting of her Cabinet which lasted for more than five hours.

In a statement, Theresa May said her Cabinet had a "long, detailed and impassioned debate" on the agreement but come to a collective agreement to go ahead with the deal.

She said the government had faced a choice between "this deal which delivers on the vote of the referendum, which brings back control of our money and borders and protects our union, or leave with no deal or no Brexit at all."

The prime minister added that: "I believe what I owe to this country and take decision in the national interest."

"I firmly believe with my head and heart this is in the best interest for Britain."

However, she acknowledged that "there will be difficult days ahead," as she seeks support for the deal.

The agreement will now pass to a special Brexit summit of EU leaders, expected in the final week of November, before returning to parliament in early December.

However, as ministers met in Downing Street, rumours swirled in Westminster that she could be about to face a vote of no confidence from furious pro-Brexit MPs.

The BBC's political editor Laura Kuenssberg reported that "Brexiteer anger [is] so high that seems likely there will be a call for no confidence vote tomorrow."

There were other reports of multiple letters of no confidence being sent to Conservative party authorities on Wednesday evening, although it remained unclear whether the 48-letter threshold for a vote of no confidence in the prime minister was about to be met.

Graham Brady, the chair of the 1922 committee of backbench Conservatives, who MPs must address their letters to, is forbidden from disclosing how many he has received.

"The truth is nobody knows [whether there will be a challenge from Conservative Brexiteers," one Conservative MP told Business Insider.

"There is definitely a lot of noise from them but not really sure how many of them are true Brexit purists willing to risk the government and even Brexit itself."

Conservative Brexiteer Conor Burns told LBC that there was "a lot of febrile talk," among Conservative MPs.

"What I can tell you is there's no orchestrated attempt to put letters in. But sensing the levels of frustration and annoyance colleagues are feeling it would not surprise me if organically letters are going in."

One factor is the party rule book which states that if a challenge were to fail then Conservative MPs would have to wait a full year before mounting another challenge.

The deal is understood to be around 400 pages long and covers the nature of Britain's withdrawal from the EU as well as the framework for Britain's future relationship with the EU.

Under the agreement, the UK has agreed to be bound by a UK-wide Brexit "backstop" which will effectively keep Britain in a customs union with the EU if the prime minister fails to secure an alternative arrangement before the end of the two-year Brexit transition period.

Conservative Brexiteers, opposition parties and the Democratic Unionist Party, who prop up May's minority government, have all signaled that they plan to vote down the deal.

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