‘Maybot’, Britain’s lady of perpetual crisis, survives as Tories unite
IT’S Wednesday morning. Theresa May’s career is over, as a glance at the morning papers will confirm.
Her Brexit deal, the product of twoand-a-half years of agonising negotiation, has been rejected by a margin of 230 votes, in the worst defeat in British history. “No deal ... No hope ... No clue ... No confidence,” declares the Mirror. The Sun edits her photo onto the body of a dodo.
Now it’s Wednesday afternoon.
Hey! She’s back!
The Labour Party is making a bid to dissolve the government. Leaping to May’s defence like gallant knights are fellow Tories, among them many who have spent the last few months plotting to remove her.
“She personifies duty, she is a patriot and a servant of our country,” said one. Another said she “might even be remembered as the greatest PM we’d had, even now.”
This is the bizarre world that is British politics, a Groundhog Day in which May awakes every day to discover herself in a dire political crisis, and every day survives, in her grim, implacable way.
The rallying of Tories against Labour’s bid to bring down the government, which was defeated by a margin of 19 votes, did it again, the thing that had seemed impossible: It put wind into her sails.
“She is indestructible,” wrote Tom Peck, a sketch writer for the Independent, reflecting on the events of the day. “She is the cockroach in nuclear winter. She is the algae that survives on sulfuric gas from subaquatic volcanoes, seven miles beneath the daylight. She is the Nokia 5210.”
May rarely gives any sense of being chastened by a defeat, plodding on in the manner that earned her the nickname “Maybot.”
Scottish Labour lawmaker Stewart Mcdonald grilled her Wednesday for signs that she was ready to reconsider her Brexit strategy. She did not comply, responding with a set of now-familiar, automatic phrases, like “deliver Brexit for the British people”, which sent Mcdonald into a spasm of frustration.
“I’m trying to be helpful to the prime minister, believe it or not, but this is pure robotic fantasy,” Mcdonald said. He grumbled about it later on Twitter, writing: “I tried. But alas, the robot within the PM kicked in and she stuck to her script.”
As Conservative lawmakers lined up to express their loyalty to May, Vicki Young, the BBC’S chief political correspondent, marvelled at their pivot from the day before, when many among them had been gleefully plotting to sink her hard-won Brexit deal.
Their circling of the wagons, she concluded, was “tribal”.
“It feels like a parallel universe, doesn’t it, considering where we were last night, just 24 hours ago,” she said. “I have to say, looking at the scenes in the last half-hour or so, it’s the most united the Conservative benches have been, probably, for months.”
A notable tribute to May came from Conservative lawmaker Mark Francois, a leader of the arch-brexiteer European Research Group.
Francois, in November, submitted a scathing letter to the party’s 1922 committee, which has the power to remove the party leader, calling for the removal of May, who he said “just doesn’t listen” and is “in complete denial”.
On Wednesday, Francois stood in her defence, acknowledging, to widespread laughter, that “she and I have not seen entirely eye to eye in the past”.
“But I am a Conservative first and last and I know opportunism when I see it,” he said. “I can tell you, when the bells ring, the whole of the ERG will walk through the lobbies with her, to vote this nonsense down.”
The failed challenge to May’s leadership came at just the right time, drawing attention away from the dismal failure of her Brexit bill, said Nikki da Costa, a former Downing Street staffer who now works as senior counsel for the Cicero Group.
“Without a doubt, it is a wonderful distraction,” she said. “It moves the news story forward very, very quickly.” It does not, however, resolve the matter at hand. On the heels of her crushing defeat Tuesday, May vowed to forge a deal that could win passage, but declined to offer specifics.