KEVIN MAGUIRE
SO, bruised Theresa May lives to die another day. The 200-117 result is a poor win, showing that more than one third of Tory MPs want her out. Plus, the humiliated PM fired the starting gun on a leadership contest by promising to quit before the next general election.
The reality of May’s “win” is laid bare when you consider that, in 1990, Margaret Thatcher won a leadership challenge by 204-152 votes, but she left No10 in tears. May’s margin is much closer than John Major’s 218-89 triumph over John Redwood in 1995, which still failed to halt constant attacks on that hapless PM by Tory rebels. The PM’s success will prove a pyrrhic victory, and she’ll be out next year. Her Brexit plan is dead, as the increasingly weak leader is clearly incapable of strong-arming Parliament into rubber-stamping her fatally flawed plan, which will leave Britain both poorer and weaker.
The dozens of Conservative Brextremists with no confidence in the Downing Street ditherer are a formidable force she will never be able to pacify.
Labour, Liberal Democrats, SNP, Plaid Cymru and a Green are also refusing to endorse her surrender of jobs, wages, businesses, public services and sovereignty to Brussels. The sensible way forward is to extend Article 50, or withdraw from it altogether, and ask the people to decide in another referendum what a paralysed Parliament cannot. The same self-serving MPs who wanted a second vote on May can’t legitimately deny folk a another Brexit ballot without being hypocritical.
But a cowardly, craven May, who puts personal interest before the national interest is unlikely to suddenly learn the art of leadership.
Right now, May in her very precarious position is the very embodiment of the phrase about being in office but not in power, as she’s been checkmated by her 27 European neighbours.
Last night’s emergency ballot was hardly the
lancing of a boil amid a festering uncivil war. By promising to go before the next election, but begging for a few months extra to get through the Brexit process, May exposed herself as a lame duck, a prisoner of contemptuous Cabinet ministers.
This was the hollowest of victories. Next time the PM shouts “jump”, the Cabinet’s Philip Hammonds, Michael Goves and Sajid Javids will keep their feet firmly on the ground to assert their independence from a No10 that’s been stripped of authority.
Jeremy Corbyn saw off David Cameron and, with May’s demise inevitable – despite last night’s result – he’ll soon find himself up against a third Tory leader.
But Labour’s struggling to form its own coherent policy on Europe, and wrestling over when to trigger a no confidence challenge that could either oust the Tories and put Corbyn in No10, or unite an enemy.