What a fine mess Cameron and May have left
It was very hard to watch British Prime Minister Theresa May resign as Conservative party leader on Friday and walk away, her face contorted, after years of Brexit penal servitude. I kept waiting for her to do a Phoebe Waller-Bridge in TV’s Fleabag and turn to the camera with a now-you’re-inon-the-joke-too delicious grin.
But she wouldn’t. May was sincere. She had tried. She had accepted the poisoned chalice handed to her by disgraced ex-PM David Cameron with his stupid wank of a referendum and been brought low. Cameron, on the other hand, scuppered his nation, resigned the next morning and left literally whistling a merry tune.
Now he sits in a twee Farrow and Ball writing shed in his garden working on a memoir no one will buy or read. If I were his publisher, I wouldn’t print it.
Strange how often women are left to clean up men’s messes — it’s the glass cliff thing — but this one was an Augean stable of cow pats and she was an assiduous Hercules. Sans river, she kept shovelling the filthy place, trying to get the Remainers, the Brexiteers and the EU to reach some kind of cleansing agreement.
The EU was magisterially calm, radiant with reason, while British politicians of every party conducted a cockfight, the air filled with fans of blood and feathers, maimings and animality. In her final speech, May said her successor “will have to find consensus in Parliament where I have not. Such a consensus can only be reached if those on all sides of the debate are willing to compromise.”
Compromise? In British politics in 2019? Two years before, May paid the primitive, rabid Northern Ireland politician Arlene Foster £1 billion to shut up and vote Tory but she’ll want more money soon. Boris Johnson, the Conservative Party’s Falstaff, wants a storm-tossed Brexit. Why not? It won’t make him less rich. He’ll still get his medications.
If anyone finds they can stand it, Johnson will become an artfully clumsy prime minister. Most of the candidates are risible. Conservatives no longer attract civilized candidates, so they will quarrel until they pick a new PM in July and then they will quarrel on.
As the commentator Marina Hyde wrote of the battle royale, the coming fratricide among those hoping to be the next PM, “it was Swift (Jonathan) who warned: ‘It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffeehouse for the voice of the kingdom.’ And it was Swift (Taylor) who said: ‘Darling I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream.’ ” It will not be pretty or even amusing.
There will be no compromise, not on anything. A hard Brexit is on the way. It will make the U.K. the sick man of Europe and the peasant of the G7. So I will proffer something I have never before contemplated: At this point, why not finish off the Tories with a no-confidence vote and let Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn become prime minister. He couldn’t do worse. No, really, he couldn’t.
Do admit, it would be entertaining to see the re-nationalization of privatized railways and their operation, water being British again, and putting the boot to Russian oligarchs and the lacquered hyper-rich whose unvisited homes clog deathly quiet London. I mean, it would be … different.
Janan Ganesh has written in the Financial Times about the growing resemblance between Europe and America “even as they divorce geopolitically.” Americans were once as rich and naïve as a Henry James character visiting Rome, a pack of Daisy Millers delivered into the rough hands of the louche Europeans.
But Americans are no longer naïve. They are crude and violent, just as Europe is becoming as extremist and white-supremacist as Trumpland. Both have grown fond of “camps,” a word with a lot of baggage. The U.K. has become repellent in its views, a real Daily Mail Island.
The EU looks cerebral compared to the Conservatives and the mob-like backbench judging of their 1922 Committee. Never mind the beasts wandering the streets, the kind who shot and stabbed Labour MP Jo Cox to death in 2016.
Cameron blithely left his country in a terrible jam. May tearfully left her country in a terrible jam. As the CBC’s Aaron Wherry points out, at the G7 this August, Justin Trudeau will meet his third British prime minister. I’m not saying it’s an Italian level of government chosen by PickUp Sticks, but it’s a start.
Many EU nations now foresee suffering for everyone, but mostly the British. “A hard Brexit in these circumstances seems an almost unstoppable reality,” a Spanish government spokesperson said. The EU thinks the Tories will want Brexit done before the next election, so the slippery thing will have to slide into place.
The EU cannot possibly offer Johnson more than it offered May, one senior EU diplomat told the Guardian. It would comfort populists, Donald Trump, and Russia. It would be unthinkable. But so was Brexit.