Daily Mail

Forget Davis, forget Boris — why hasn’t Mother Theresa quit?

- Richard.littlejohn@dailymail.co.uk

NEvER mind Boris, never mind David Davis. Why the hell hasn’t Theresa May resigned? She has repeatedly misled the British people and forfeited the privilege of being our Prime Minister. We now know her oft-parroted ‘Brexit means Brexit’ was a sham, a meaningles­s soundbite calculated to deceive. Her vision of Brexit is Remain by any other name. Always was.

She has sold out the 17.4 million people who voted Leave in the referendum. She has betrayed the 80 per cent of the electorate who voted at the last General Election for parties committed to carrying out Brexit as advertised.

Almost 20 years ago, after Labour’s landslide victory, the odious federast Peter Mandelson, addressing a German audience, remarked smugly: ‘ The era of pure representa­tive democracy is coming to an end.’ For once Mandelson spoke the truth. But it has taken a Conservati­ve PM to ignore the result of the biggest single vote for anything in our history.

If May gets away with this constituti­onal outrage, Britain will cease to be a proper democracy. She has signalled that the vested interests of big business, the Civil Service and the political class count for more than the views of voters expressed at the ballot box.

one hundred years exactly after the extension of the franchise, and 90 years after women over 21 were finally given the vote, our second female Prime Minister has decided that your vote isn’t worth the ballot paper it’s scribbled on.

The men, and women, in Whitehall, in Brussels, in the boardrooms, in the think-tanks, in the courtrooms, really do know best. So shut up and concentrat­e on the World Cup.

Watching wall-to-wall football was certainly my intention up until last Friday. I had planned to take an extended break, to forget all about the Brexit debacle for a few weeks. Then the news from Chequers filtered through to my sun lounger and stirred me from my stupor.

HOW could I relax while Britain was being sold down the Swanee? Which is why I am back in the paper sooner than I expected.

It was clear that May had called the Cabinet together to bury Brexit while the rest of the country was distracted by the exploits of Harry Kane and company in Russia.

What we saw on Friday was a revolution in reverse — the Government overthrowi­ng the people. In this Looking Glass world, the so- called ‘rebels’ are the handful of principled politician­s who are actually prepared to stand up for the electorate.

So desperate was May to force her capitulati­on through Cabinet that she even threatened to strip dissenters of their ministeria­l cars on the spot.

How unbelievab­ly petty. This wasn’t strong leadership, it was the worst kind of weakness.

Whatever happened to ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’? More hollow rhetoric. Then again, May is terminally weak. Regular readers will be aware that from day one I’ve never thought she was up to the job.

From the off, her heart hasn’t been in leaving the EU, in any shape or form, despite her fatuous ‘Brexit means Brexit’ mantra.

She’s bungled the negotiatio­ns, caved in to Brussels at every turn and gone out of her way to appease both the Civil Service and the Remain headbanger­s in her own party.

What else should we have expected from a woman who spent the entire referendum campaign hiding behind the sofa?

Her career has been characteri­sed by indecision. She got the job by default, only because Boris was shafted by his ex-lieutenant Michael Gove. over the weekend, Gove was at it again, siding with May’s sell- out against his fellow Leavers. So the man who said famously that the public was sick of ‘experts’ has decided to support the ‘experts’ after all.

Perhaps Gove still thinks he has a shot at becoming Prime Minister himself. Frankly, who cares?

This isn’t about individual ambition, much as the political class always manage to make everything about them. It’s about the fundamenta­l principle of who determines our destiny — the British people or those we elect to represent us?

And ever since the result of the EU referendum was announced, the majority of the political class have worked cynically to derail our departure, to keep us in perpetuity as prisoners of an anti- democratic, sclerotic European superstate.

That’s exactly what the decisions taken at Chequers on Friday would do, even though we voted unequivoca­lly to take back control of our laws, our money and our borders.

Independen­t sovereign nations do not collect taxes on behalf of foreign government­s. Independen­t sovereign nations do not accept the jurisdicti­on of unelected foreign judges. Independen­t sovereign nations do not swallow wholesale rules made by unaccounta­ble foreign bureaucrat­s. Independen­t sovereign nations are at liberty to conclude free trade deals with any country in the world.

But if May gets her way, none of that will apply. Britain will still be subject to European directives and the rulings of European judges. That’s not Brexit by any stretch of the imaginatio­n.

No wonder David Davis finally summoned up the spine to resign. He should have walked away months ago when it became glaringly apparent that although he was nominally in charge of negotiatin­g Brexit, he was being undermined by the Prime Minister and her Remainiac placemen in the Civil Service.

Davis has gone about his business with optimism and good humour, despite being faced with an obdurate Michel Barnier, the EU’s Monsieur Non. He has until now remained loyal to May and has been repaid with a stiletto between the shoulder blades. After Friday, his position was untenable.

As for Boris, at least he’s done the decent thing and not left Davis swinging in the wind. How could he possibly remain part of Government hell-bent on destroying his vision of an independen­t, freebootin­g, global Britain?

It was Bojo’s optimism, his enthusiasm, his can- do attitude which helped convince so many people to cast off the shackles of the EU and take a leap into the future. My view was that he had earned the right to have his shot at the top job. He’s far from the bumbling imbecile his enemies like to pretend he is.

AFTER all, he ran London for eight years — far better than the present incumbent. And if he’d screwed up spectacula­rly, then we still wouldn’t be any worse off than we are today. We needed a swashbuckl­ing, strong, confident Prime Minister, who actually believed in Brexit, to lead us forward.

We got Mrs May. She’s wasted two vital years. As I wrote a couple of months ago, it’s been two years of vacillatio­n, obfuscatio­n, cowardice and downright sabotage.

Now her ‘vision’ of Brexit is no Brexit at all, a wish-list so watered down some people might conclude it’s not worth leaving the EU. Either that, or it is designed deliberate­ly to make it easier for us to rejoin a few years down the line.

Which was probably her intention all along. But this wasn’t what we were promised and it isn’t what we voted for. May has turned Britain, one of the world’s great economies and military powers, into an internatio­nal laughing stock, a pushover, incapable of surviving independen­tly.

How does she square that with her Christian conscience? How can she live with the knowledge that she has betrayed the British people? Every week this vicar’s daughter parades her piety, pictured leaving the Sunday service at her local church in Berkshire. Who knew her role model here on earth was Judas Iscariot?

Forget Boris, forget Davis. If Mother Theresa had a shred of decency, she would be the one resigning.

It seems that this vicar’s daughter’s role model on earth is Judas Iscariot

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