We need a leader to build national unity – Mrs May isn’t that person

Britain is in a huge mess, but the PM is terminally damaged and doesn’t have the essential qualities

It will go down in the annals of political understatement alongside David Cameron’s mordant post-referendum observation “well that didn’t go to plan”. Theresa May told her depleted band of MPS on Monday that she had got them into a mess and she would get them out of it. But mess doesn’t even begin to describe the position the Government and the country are now in.

The way some senior Tories are talking, you might have thought that nothing had really changed last Thursday. The official line now is that the Conservatives won the most seats and the most votes so Mrs May can just carry on pretty much as before minus a couple of scapegoated Downing Street aides. True, things didn’t quite go to plan; but constitutionally the position is clear – we have a Government and sustained by the votes of the DUP it can, theoretically, carry on for five years.

But politically everything has changed. Now the Tories are even dumping austerity, presumably on the grounds that the election outcome suddenly generated billions of pounds that no one realised existed. Conservatives who were wedded to deficit reduction and derided Jeremy Corbyn’s “magic money tree” now want one of their own.

They say they misjudged the public’s appetite for free stuff. Yet they never made the case against it in a campaign where the economy and the parlous state of the public finances hardly featured as issues. If the Tory response to last Thursday is to move even further across the political spectrum to try to match Labour’s profligacy then the country is in real trouble.

Moreover, voters will surely conclude that if prudent management of the nation’s finances and reform of the public services no longer matter, then why not go the whole hog and elect a party that will spend even more. Should there be another election soon, how will the Tories counter Labour’s spendthrift promises when they are making their own?

Almost as bad is what is happening inside the Labour Party. Here the Blairite moderates are queuing up to say how they misjudged Corbyn. I heard Chuka Umunna, who always struck me as one of the more sensible Labour MPS, accepting that he had been wrong about the party leader’s ability to perform well in an election.

Really? Was that the Blairites’ principal objection to Corbyn – that he might not cut the mustard in a campaign? Naively I thought they were opposed to what he stood for. Are Umunna, Yvette Cooper and the rest all now in favour of renationalisation and the other loonie Left policies contained in a manifesto that many of them disavowed during the campaign?

And what about Brexit? This is now not so much a mess as a potential disaster. Again, some senior Tories are trying to promote the line that nothing has changed. Mrs May told the backbenchers that she is to continue with the policy she had already decided upon and the election had not knocked her off course. The thinking is that because Labour has supported Brexit and made noises about leaving the single market and the customs union (which is essential if the UK is to make a success of Brexit and negotiate its own trade agreements) they will back the Government and support leaving without a deal if that is where we end up. Essentially, the Brexiteers are now relying on Corbyn and John Mcdonnell to deliver a clean break with Europe.

But a year from now does anyone really believe Labour, the minority parties and a few dozen Remain supporting Conservatives will vote for such an outcome? After all, it was because she feared that the opposition would thwart her Brexit stand that Mrs May sought a stronger mandate. How can she now say with a weaker hand that she can just keep going as before? She can’t, as William Hague pointed out on this page yesterday.

Then again, many suspect that the real reason she wanted a big majority was not to push the UK into a “hard Brexit” but the opposite. She needed the authority in Parliament to see off the ultras in her own party who would object to any concessions on the Brexit bill to be paid or compromises on immigration that may be made to gain access to the single market.

If this is true then she is now able to pursue the softer approach she had planned because she has no option. It will open her to attack from the hardliners, but all that matters now is the parliamentary arithmetic. This is why a cross-party approach is necessary because, otherwise, how can the EU negotiators know that anything they agree with the Government won’t be shot down in flames a year from now? On the other hand, can the Tories adopt a bipartisan approach with a Labour Party in the grip of the hard Left? A mess indeed.

The last time an election resulted in a minority government, in February 1974, Edward Heath, who had just lost office, said of the new Labour administration: “It is good discipline... It has a most wonderful effect of concentrating the mind on what is necessary to the nation, rather than what might be necessary to assuage some of the wild men on the backbenches. It is a very healthy thing.”

At this critical juncture, then, we need to look beyond party advantage and appeal to that somewhat unfashionable concept, the national interest. The much-maligned DUP yesterday said its overriding motive for reaching an accommodation to keep the Tories in power was to create some stability on the eve of the Brexit talks.

A belief in what is best for the nation is an oft-derided virtue but, as Michael Gove said in this newspaper yesterday, if we want to heal the rifts exposed by the referendum and the election, then it is important to command the widest possible support for the deal to leave the EU. He argued that this was achievable under the Prime Minister. But not only is she terminally damaged and bereft of authority, building a sense of national unity on such a divisive issue will require leadership qualities of the sort that Mrs May simply does not possess on the evidence we have seen.

She was right to tell the MPS that she created this mess – but she is emphatically not the person to get us out of it. Is there a national leader who can? Your country needs you now.