Words win PM some time, but not much

If a leader’s fate could be decided by a single speech, Theresa May’s tenure at the top of the Conservative Party might not have survived the calamitous delivery of last year’s keynote Tory conference address. Instead the prime minister made it through another year and, in a vastly improved display, was able even to joke about the mishaps that ruined her attempted relaunch in 2017. But just as one bad day did not destroy May, a relatively good one does not save her. The structural obstacles to success, in Brexit and other policy areas, are unchanged by her performance in Birmingham.

May has at least bought herself time. It might be only a few weeks, but she can proceed with Brexit negotiations more confident that her party is willing her to succeed instead of plotting her demise.

However, the prime minister’s insistence on separating Brexit from other policy areas is at the root of her problems. She sees the EU negotiation as a discrete task, a necessary chore that distracts from the business of fixing ‘‘burning injustices’’, bringing people together and generally achieving the fine things advertised in her speeches. She fails to see that Brexit – and her manner of handling it in particular, rejecting the single market before negotiations had even begun – has been an engine of national disunity and a costly folly that can only feed the flames.