Allister HEATH
Even if her deal doesn’t pass, the powerless PM has to resign. The party needs a pro-brexit leader
Rejoice, rejoice: everything has changed. At some point over the next few weeks, after three painful, debilitating, embarrassing and, above all, largely wasted years, Theresa May will quit, triggering the mother of all battles for the Tory party’s soul. Her decision to step down couldn’t have come a moment too soon: the constitution is collapsing, with the Speaker and Parliament grabbing power, Brexit is being betrayed, and the economy is drifting.
For a while, Mrs May has been in office, not in power, at a time when the country is desperate for a fresh vision, for competent leadership, for hope: she needed to go. The decision cannot have been easy, and the implosions of all high-profile political careers are tragic, even shattering affairs, but she has made the right choice.
The implications are immense. After the false dawn of 2016, when Leavers robbed themselves of the leadership, and the catastrophic lost election of 2017, the Conservative Party now faces a make or break decision. It will need to choose the right person to salvage Brexit, to repair our democracy, to save capitalism and to defeat Jeremy Corbyn’s vile, extremist Labour Party.
Yet even if all goes to plan, Mrs May’s successor will immediately be handed a ticking time-bomb, the worst, most toxic aspect of Mrs May’s legacy: her awful, appalling Withdrawal Agreement, the passing of which by Parliament she has made conditional for her to resign.
We do not know precisely what will happen if it doesn’t gain the support of enough MPS – as still seems likely – but it is inconceivable that she would be able to cling on for very long. She cannot threaten to un-resign if her deal ends up being blocked; she cannot admit to being the wrong person for the job, and then stay on.
In reality, the power has already drained from the Prime Minister, as it always does as soon as somebody announces their resignation in advance. The leadership battle, which will formally begin in May, will now start openly, all the candidates having long since run secret leadership operations to prepare for this moment.
It is conventional, at moments like this, to reflect on a departing Prime Minister’s many achievements. It was possible to see the positives (as well as the many negatives) in Sir John Major, Tony Blair or Gordon Brown’s time in power. It is not really possible to do so in Mrs May’s case: the best that can be said is that she was driven by a strong sense of duty, and has devoted much of her life to public service. For that, she deserves our thanks.
But good intentions aren’t enough when it comes to governing a country. It is clear that she would have been a hopeless Prime Minister during the easiest, most prosperous and peaceful of times; putting her in charge of the most complex project in decades guaranteed its utter, abject failure.
Her clumsy, hectoring style, the harshness of her language, her blind trust in officialdom, her inability to put a positive spin on what ought to have been her life’s work radicalised the Remainers, while simultaneously leading the Brexiteers up the garden path, a betrayal that her successor will now have to try to undo. Hers has been a calamitous premiership which has achieved nothing other than trash democracy, cost the economy and divide the country.
It’s not just with Brexit that it all went wrong: her legacy as home secretary has come home to roost, with violent crime surging. The economy is lacklustre, bogged down by ever more taxes and regulations: Britain desperately needs a dose of radical free-market economics and yet with Mrs May it got stuck with an ultra-interventionist, born-again social democrat.
They may not realise it yet, but Mrs May’s decision to stand down is the worst possible news for the Remainers. They were on the ascendant, taking control of Parliament and on the brink of imposing a Brexit in name only. Yet if the Tories elect a Brexiteer as their next leader, which barring an astonishing stitch-up by MPS is likely given the membership’s hard-core Euroscepticism, much will change. The charade of the indicative votes will count for naught: everything will be reset, subject to the constraints of the Withdrawal Agreement, if it is signed. A proper Brexiteer PM would also clear out the negotiating team: the impact would be revolutionary.
The Eurosceptics, who made a terrible error of judgment in propping up Mrs May after her election defeat, were trapped: their only way out was to remove her, and they failed last year. Before last night’s announcement, it appeared that the Remainers were closing in on total triumph, thanks to a combination of Philip Hammond-led scheming and Speaker John Bercow’s power grab.
All of this now looks irrelevant: a Brexiteer would appoint a new Chancellor, and the indicative votes will be disregarded by the new PM. Even if they were “implemented”, they would only affect the Political Declaration, not the Withdrawal Agreement, and a new PM will not be bound by the former.
In any case, whether a Brexiteer or Remainer takes over the party, it is hard to see how it avoids a general election, which would also cancel out the outcome of the indicative votes. If somebody such as Boris Johnson takes over, some Remainers will quit; the tensions are now so high within the party, the divisions so extreme, so angry, so irreconcilable that some sort of split seems inevitable. One side must win and another lose: it’s that simple. It’s a choice that the Tories can no longer avoid. This will have to mean an election, which would also be required to get rid of Mr Bercow.
The problem for the Brexiteers is that the composition of Parliament is against them: a general election is a hugely risky strategy but the only way they can break free, assuming they get the right leader. A Tory victory, even a modest one, would also finish off Mr Corbyn, proving even to the hard-left that he cannot win.
Mrs May was the wrong leader at the wrong time. Her legacy could be the worst treaty this country has ever signed. Yet her departure has the potential to reboot our politics after three destructive, nihilistic years. The leadership battle will be the Tory party’s most important decision in a generation: for once, it musn’t botch it.
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