EU agrees to 3-month delay in Brexit divorce

LONDON — Britain got Brexit breathing space but no clarity on Monday when the European Union granted a three-month delay to the U.K.’s departure from the bloc.

British politicians immediately began using the extra time to do what they have done for more than three years — bicker about Brexit.

After a testy debate in the House of Commons, lawmakers rejected Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s call to hold an early election as a way of breaking the political deadlock over the country’s stalled departure from the EU.

Legislators voted by 299-70 for a motion to hold a Dec. 12 election — short of the two-thirds majority of the 650 House of Commons lawmakers needed for it to pass.

Still, an election appears inevitable ahead of the next scheduled one in 2022 if Britain is to move on from the stasis caused by a prime minister who vowed to deliver Brexit “do or die” and a Parliament that has repeatedly thwarted him.

Johnson said he would try again this week, using a different procedure — a bill, which only needs a simple majority to pass.

“The only way to get Brexit done is to go to the people of this country,” Johnson told legislators, accusing his opponents of betraying voters’ decision to leave the EU.

He said that unless there was an election, the government would be “like Charlie Brown, endlessly running up to kick the ball only to have Parliament whisk it away.”

“We cannot continue with this endless delay,” he added.

Yet further delay stretched ahead after the EU agreed to postpone Brexit until Jan. 31, acting to avert a chaotic U.K. departure just three days before Britain was due to become the first country ever to leave the 28-nation bloc.

After a short meeting of diplomats in Brussels, European Council President Donald Tusk tweeted that...