Time’s up, Mrs May The PM needs a TARDIS to flee her party chaos

THE BAR? IT’S BEEN LOWERED

I WAS talking to a Conservative backbencher this week about heading up to their Birmingham conference.

They’re not, I think it’s fair to say, in great form.

“It’s going to be mayhem,” he said. “God only knows what will happen. There are lots of angry people about. Think I’ll pack a crash helmet.”

Much of the fury around the party at the moment is focused on PM Theresa May.

The Conservatives divide themselves into two schools of thought – those who think she’ll be gone this year, and those who think it will be 2019.

My glum Tory mate summed it up: “The only way she’d survive is with a f***ing time machine.”

An interesting thought there... Theresa May as Doctor Who.

She has a whole load of scary-looking enemies, better known as the Cabinet, where foes such as Michael Gove lurk.

But where would she go with a time machine? And where did her problems start?

Maybe the most obvious answer would be to take her TARDIS back before David Cameron promised an EU referendum.

Perhaps she could have talked him out of it, since Brexit really has tied her hands.

Maybe back to that walking holiday where the fateful decision to hold her disastrous general election was made.

Or the evening she got Boris’s CV for the Foreign Secretary job.

Or maybe all these things were inevitable and couldn’t be changed. The pressure to have an EU referendum THE Sports and Social bar in Parliament had a reputation for being a bit rough round the edges but it wasn’t the den of iniquity some tried to make out.

Yes, it looked like it had been round the block a bit.

The toilets weren’t great, the whole place needed a lick of would have always been there, which begat the election, which begat a rampant Boris.

There was an interesting discussion at Labour Conference, admittedly quite late at night.

It was during one of those conversations where you sort out who killed Kennedy*, the names of the 1992 AC Milan back four** and your all-time Top Five chocolate bars***.

The theory put forward is that Mrs May never really wanted the job in the first place. That was probably wrong

THEA Lr ap bs o, ul ri Pw at r, t) yd Ce oe ng fen rf e- nr cu eo w( aa s,k a- li mk o, se t,k uno iv, es rsa am lly* h* a* ii lt et do as a success. Spending time with the people who put it together, you see the toll organising an event like that takes.

Everything slides off schedule, there are late nights and early mornings, and problems appear from nowhere.

I phoned one senior Labour figure this week only to find them in a queue at the airport. “When will you be back?” I asked. “Dunno,” he said. “I’ve only booked one-way.” paint and I think I once saw the carpet on Time Team.

This was not a bar where you would bring a visitor or hang around just to be seen.

But it was comfy and one of the few places to properly relax.

Now those days are gone and the old place has been reopened but the next theory was far closer to the truth: She did want the job, but now she doesn’t want it any more.

She wants to walk away, and has wanted to for a while. But she can’t.

One of the keys to Mrs May’s personality is her sense of duty.

Because of that, she needs a way to go that will let her save face and ensure a smooth transition.

However much she hates the job, she won’t want to hand it over to Boris.

So some of the moves she’s made, like the Chequers deal, are almost cries and rebranded as The Woolsack. I called a mate who’s been in it and asked him what it was like.

“They’ve done it up top to bottom,” he said. “It’s got a new carpet, paint job, the whole place smells brand new.”

Then his voice went all sad: “It’s terrible.” for help. It’s almost, almost, worthy of sympathy. And the last place she needs to be is conference.

Where the vultures are not just circling – they’ve got their knives and forks out and the claret’s been breathing just long enough.

Maybe we should all chip in and get Mrs May that time machine.

Let her go back to happier times, when the sun was out, birds were singing, and there was nothing more to life than getting a couple of friends together and running through the wheatfields. I’ll head to the Tory conference in Birmingham this weekend less enthusiastically than I did to Labour’s in Liverpool. And not just because of the clientele – but because a scorpion was found in my hotel! The RSPCA said it was “only small but a feisty little thing”. So my dilemma is: If your hotel has scorpions would you want them to be feisty and small .... or laid-back and massive?