Deluded Mrs May no match for EU
AS THE pretty awful annus domini called 2018 slips away behind us our beloved but battered country is not so much in chaos as in utter bewilderment. We know we are mocked and sneered at worldwide and wonder what we have done to deserve this.
All we did, as a people granted a single vote on a single subject, was elect to cease membership of a group of nations whose eventual destination – total unification – we felt we could no longer embrace.
Since then two-and-a-half years of the sort of political and official chaos we thought was the speciality of banana republics. Surely this cannot happen in rock-solid Great Britain. The Mother of Parliaments reduced to a quarrelling shambles? Ministers resigning in job lots? Her Majesty’s First Minister scuttling across the Channel, begging bowl in hand, on an almost daily basis?
Yup, the lot. Right at the centre of it all the core and architect – a lady called Theresa May. Her main fault – and this will come out one day in her biography – is that she absolutely cannot believe there is anything she is not good at. Actually there are a minimum two. She cannot organise, conduct and win a general election, which is not very encouraging for a prime minister. From the hour she was dumped into Downing Street by default – the election to replace David Cameron disintegrated – she insisted on calling an election we neither sought nor needed. Her plan was to replace a fragile majority with a commanding one.
SHE ordered all her ministers to step aside and leave it to her. She then devised the worst manifesto in history and masterminded (if that’s the word) the worst campaign in memory, driving a large poll lead into a hung parliament. Then she devoted herself to negotiating the people’s choice from desire to reality. She overlooked one thing: she must be the world’s worse negotiator. In big business, commerce and industry there are people who are real experts. She could have seconded a team from the City to clinch a mutually fair, just and equitable new relationship between us and the remaining EU. Ordering her ministers to stand aside and leave it to her, or going with her guru Olly Robbins behind their backs until they resigned, she made “Leave it to me” her mantra. And delivered a total fiasco of a “settlement”.
Her opponents grouped around Michel Barnier in Brussels ran rings round her. She fell into every arranged pitfall starting with the deliberately confected fiction of the “Irish backstop” where non-EU Ulster abuts very much EU Irish Republic. So where is the Swiss backstop? The Norwegian backstop? It can be proved that modern technology means lorry cargoes can be scanned at the border (a few seconds photographing the bill of lading) and the computer does all the maths miles away. By the time her incompetence was finished she had a “settlement” that our Parliament simply could never approve.
It is a recipe for perpetual vassalage on our knees, much worse than we are now. Apart from a few remaining ultra-loyals (loyal to their careers rather than this country) the entire Government wishes to replace her – fast. Others see a chance to reverse our referendum decision – these are the UK-disloyal Fifth Column.
Corbyn sees a chance of a powergrab and a Marxist regime at last. And still the lady substitutes blind obstinacy for talent, telling us that her negotiated disaster will fulfil all our dreams. It is known she goes to church every Sunday. I suppose a little divine intervention is not on the cards? Let’s pray for a better 2019. It seems the only thing that might work.