If her party keeps its nerve, Mrs May could be one of our longest-serving PMS
Tory MPS should stay calm and learn a lesson from the past if they want to succeed at the next election
On Friday December 5 1924, Winston Churchill told a political dinner in Liverpool: “I recognise the truth of Disraeli’s remark that the vicissitudes of politics are inexhaustible.” Only the previous year, the Tory prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, had called a general election he hadn’t needed over the issue of Britain’s trading relations with the rest of the world, and although the Conservatives had been returned as the largest party they did not have an overall majority in the House of Commons. Sound familiar?
Yet a year later, in October 1924, Baldwin’s Tories won a 210-seat majority in the third general election in two years, and, while not even a member of the Conservative Party, Churchill became chancellor of the exchequer in a surprise appointment, hence the celebratory dinner at which he quoted Disraeli’s great truth about British politics.
As Tory MPS enjoy their holidays, they will be wondering whether that truth might extend to the political fortunes of Theresa May.
It will.
Most political faults have their opposites, which can ultimately come to be viewed as virtues. Margaret Thatcher’s hectoring stridency which irritated so many people by 1990 is now recognised as the inevitable by-product of an admirable conviction politics. John Major’s grey dullness could be reinterpreted as low-key reassurance. David Cameron’s decision to let the people decide on Brexit – excoriated at the time and since by the Establishment – will one day be seen as the greatest single act of popular democracy in action since the Second World War.
Similarly, Mrs May’s dogged refusal to be bamboozled into resigning after her own unnecessary general election, instead staying on to calm and steady the post-article 50 nation, establish a working majority in parliament, dump the unpopular and controversial parts of her (disastrous) manifesto and her equally unpopular and controversial key lieutenants, and simply carry on with business as usual while the Brexit negotiations are carried on, will one day be appreciated by the electorate.
“Keep Buggering On” was Churchill’s watchword, and it evokes a positive response from many Britons. That is what Mrs May has done, and will do for the next few years. The time is right to buy Mays on the political stock exchange, which will be much higher in price once she puts in a good showing at the party conference in October.
Needless to say, she is fortunate that there is no obvious choice to replace her as leader of the party, and the person best placed to replace her as prime minister is a Marxist-leninist surrounded by advisers whose views would make Attlee, Bevin, Gaitskell, Wilson and Callaghan turn in their graves. People who voted Labour in the last election in order to lessen Mrs May’s expected majority, or punish her hubris, or escape the dementia tax, will not do so next time as these no longer apply. Indeed, if anything, she’ll be the underdog, hungrier even than Jeremy Corbyn for her first personal mandate. Moreover, the youth voters who genuinely believed – with all the naivety of those new to politics – that that nice Mr Corbyn would really pay off their student loans and abolish tuition fees have now presumably woken up to the awful truth.
The next election will therefore be nothing like the last, and Mrs May could very well win it, assuming that she is rallied behind by her party and we are out of the EU by then, and Brexit is no longer an issue. It is one of the less attractive features of the Conservative Party that it is perpetually oscillating between complacency and panic; gone are the days when it just kept buggering on, making the case for free enterprise and free markets and not fretting too much about its leaders until the time came swiftly to decapitate them. Now is emphatically not that time.
The latest British Election Study report emphasised how powerful the Remain vote was in stymying the Tories at the last election, which it presumably won’t after Brexit happens in March 2019 – especially if, as now seems likely, there’s a transitional period to massage their pain at the separation. Tory Remainers will return to the fold, especially if Labour are forced to set out their genuine agenda of mansion taxes, huge income supertaxes, and possibly even exchange controls to prevent the expected flight of capital from Britain in the event of John Mcdonnell entering the Treasury. All the Conservative Party needs to do is hold its nerve, which it seems to be very bad at nowadays.
One hopeful sign emerging from Philip Hammond’s trip to Argentina is that Britain’s past relations with a country seem to be of little relation to its willingness to do trade deals with us. Former enemies like Argentina, former Communist states like Vietnam and Cambodia, former British colonies across Africa and Asia: all are keen to increase trade with the world’s fifthlargest economy once we are free of Brussels. For all that Donald Trump might personally be something of an oaf, his attitude towards trading with us is altogether better in every respect than that of the widely-beloved Barack Obama, who threatened to send us “to the back of the queue” if we had the temerity to vote for the same independence that his country has enjoyed for more than 240 years. In terms of the British national interest, there is simply no comparison between them for who is better for us.
Assuming there are few by-elections in Tory seats, that the deal with the Ulstermen holds, and that Michel Barnier, the European chief negotiator, only subjects Britain to the minimum of punishment beatings, the prospects for the Tory party in 2020 or 2021 will be far rosier than they appear today. Even if Barnier does go too far, there is every possibility of a patriotic backlash against the Lib Dems and SNP, which might be seen as aiding and abetting him.
When Tory MPS come back from their holidays they must simply and calmly make the case for a dogged prime minister who is quietly delivering record low unemployment numbers, sky-high stock market figures and higher growth forecasts than France, whose shiny new president is already showing signs of imploding. At present, people look to Emmanuel Macron with hope and confidence, and at our own prime minister with embarrassment. Within a year those positions could easily be reversed, as Macron buckles to the unions like every French president since de Gaulle, while May and David Davis continue to make the case for a strong British economy helping to resuscitate the European one.
If, instead, Tory MPS return to Westminster like sharks who have smelt the first drops of blood in the water, ready for a political feeding frenzy, it will be years before the voluntary wing of the Tory party and the rest of the country will forgive them.
“It was a capable, sedate government,” was Churchill’s estimation of the 1924-29 ministry in which he was chancellor of the exchequer. With the upsets and alarms of the past couple of years, those are two adjectives that the British people would be happy to settle for from Mrs May over the next half-decade, and possibly beyond. It is up to her parliamentary party to let her get on and deliver it, and if they do, they will be rewarded at the next general election. Instead of being one of the shortest-serving prime ministers, dogged Mrs May could conceivably be one of the longest.