What the commentators said
This is the first time that a British prime minister will have been chosen by a group of party members, said Rafael Behr in The Guardian, and there’s an awful lot riding on it. The next PM will need to represent the whole country, not just the 52% who voted Leave, and they’ll have to “navigate the most turbulent sea” with a narrow Commons majority. Tory members must judge the candidates “not on the basis of doctrinal purity, nor in retaliation for perceived betrayals of some platonic ideal of their party’s past, but on capability”. Judged on that criterion, the uninspiring May clearly comes out on top.
The fact that May was a “soft Remainer” also counts in her favour, said Sam Leith in the London Evening Standard. Whether people like it or not, Britain is now heading out of the EU, and it’s in everyone’s interests that this separation is handled amicably. Better, then, that the process proceeds with “a show of sad reluctance than angry defiance”. That is sure to happen in any case, said Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. Most of the negotiations, after all, will “be carried out by civil servants who hate Brexit and will instinctively look for means of retaining, by another name, our EU membership”. That’s why we need the next Tory leader to be a bold reformer who genuinely believes in Brexit and is determined to honour the wishes of the 17.5 million people who voted for it.
But what exactly did all those 17.5 million people vote for? It’s still not quite clear, said Stephen Bush in the New Statesman. The Leave campaign combined “ruthless precision” about the costs of EU membership – the “illusory £350m a week that could be clawed back with a Brexit vote, the imagined 75 million Turks who would rock up to Britain in the days after a Remain vote” – with “calculated ambiguity about what exit would look like”. It will fall to the new Tory leadership to define the exact terms of our departure, and the model they come up with will “shape the direction of British politics and economics for the next half-century, perhaps longer”. That’s what’s at stake in this election. How extraordinary that the decision will ultimately rest with just 150,000 Tory party members.