Deliver Brexit and May could remain as PM for years
AS OTHER prime ministers have found out before her, Theresa May has just discovered that there is no way you can answer a question on your leadership intentions without inviting a barrage of speculation.
Asked a straight question as to whether she would like to lead the Conservatives into the next election, she said that yes, she was in it for the long term – provoking her enemies in the party, including Lord Heseltine and Nicky Morgan, into snorts of derision.
But what if she had answered “no”, that she hadn’t yet made up her mind, or if she had tried to divert the interview on to a different subject? It would have caused just as much of a frenzy. Listen to her, people would have said, her heart isn’t in it any more. It’s not a matter of if she is deposed but when.
Of course Theresa May bears a lot of responsibility for the weakened position of the Government. There was nothing wrong in her calling a general election this year but she damaged her performance first by dithering, then by running a lacklustre and unnecessarily long campaign which allowed Jeremy Corbyn to perfect his act as a personable champion of ordinary people.
Looking at how the Conservatives threw away her majority, the obvious narrative is that Theresa May is a useless campaigner and should not be allowed by her party to fight a second general election. Yet that ignores just how far away is the next election. If, as Harold Wilson said, a week is a long time in politics, four years and nine months is more like a geological age.
INEVITABLY the political landscape will be hugely different then. There is no reason at all why Mrs May, employing her political skills and making the most of any luck that comes her way, should not go into the next election as the unassailable leader of her party.
After all, who just a year ago would have given Jeremy Corbyn the slightest chance of establishing himself, as he has now done, as beyond challenge as Labour leader? Who, last December in the afterglow of a remarkable by-election result for the Lib Dems in Richmond