THERESA MAY’S GRUBBY DEAL TO PROP UP HER GOVERNMENT

Magic money tree bears fruit

NOW we know the price of power.

It is £100million for each of the 10 Democratic Unionist Party’s MPs.

That is the amount of money Theresa May handed over yesterday so she could cling to office.

This is a deal so tawdry the Prime Minister did not even put her name to it and left her chief whip Gavin Williamson to sign the document.

She then sent out her deputy Damian Green, the Arthur Daley of Tory politics, to sell the dodgy package to MPs.

You did not need to look under the bonnet to realise the taxpayers were getting royally ripped off.

Not only is it the most expensive paint job in British political history, but the Tories have wound back the clock by forming an alliance with a party which is anti-gay and anti-abortion.

The DUP’s antipathy to Jeremy Corbyn runs so deep they were never going to topple the Government by voting down the Queen’s Speech. Having spent £130million on a botched election, the spendthrift Prime Minister has now splashed a further £1billion on buying support which was already in the bag.

She has undermined the Tories’ image of economic prudence, risked the peace process and stoked resentment in other parts of the UK.

During the election Mrs May told a nurse asking for pay rise there was no “magic money tree”.

She also raised the spectre of a coalition of chaos: a Labour minority government in hock to the SNP.

Theresa May has a cynical hunger for self-preservation at any price.