May to December

In the last two months, the Prime Minister Theresa May has lost three Ministers from her Cabinet – one over harassment allegations from women, one for conducting negotiations with the Prime Minister of Israel behind her back, and now her closest ally and friend from student days, the Deputy Prime Minister, has been sacked for lying about pornography on his work computer.

Mrs May disrupted the Brexit negotiations for two months by calling an unnecessary general election, after saying seven times that it would be against the country’s interest to do so, for the cynical reason that she thought she would destroy the Labour Party.

Instead, she lost her majority as a result of the voters kicking out Tory MPS in many parts of England and SNP MPS in Scotland, while in Edinburgh South Ian Murray’s Labour majority soared from 2,600 to over 15,000. She clings on in No 10 by bribing MPS from Northern Ireland’s DUP with £1 billion a year of taxpayers’ money – money which she claims is not available elsewhere as food banks proliferate, the roads are full of potholes and the NHS heads for collapse.

Meanwhile the delayed Brexit talks only make progress by Britain giving in to the EU over handing them £39bn – a rather high price to pay for printing passports in blue rather than red, passports which Mrs Thatcher had changed and the UK could have left blue all this time if they had wanted to. Yet in a recent interview Mrs May denied 2017 had been a bad year for her. Just like when she did a U-turn over the dementia tax during the election, and then cried “Nothing has changed! Nothing has changed!”, she will not admit facts that everyone else can see to be true. If this were happening to a private individual, this downward spiral of misjudgments and loss of status would be a personal misfortune which would deserve compassion and help from her friends, but she is dragging the country down with her.

PHIL TATE Craiglockhart Road, Edinburgh