Tories don’t want May but can’t get rid of her
COULD it have been worse? Well, I suppose it could have been an Andrea Leadsom leader’s speech. That would have been far worse.
But for Theresa May, excruciating doesn’t begin to cover what happened on Wednesday.
On the eve of the conference speech, we mused, as everyone else in Manchester did, over the prospects for the Prime Minister and her possible successors.
One very experienced old hand in Government, who weathered many a storm, pitched in that when you are besieged in Downing Street, a Prime Minister takes it one day at a time.
Get through a day undamaged, and it becomes a week. The weeks stretch into months, by Christmas the glimmering light of survival peeks over the horizon. She’ll be lucky to make it to Christmas now. A coughing fit, a prankster and a pratfall stage set snuffed out May’s hopes like a guttering advent candle.
There is no point in rehearsing again how bad it was to witness a Prime Minister coming apart, except to say that when her husband Philip dashed to the stage he looked as if he was comforting the bereaved.
Now the embodiment of George Osborne’s stiletto insult, she is the walking dead. Yet she must carry on.
The Tories daren’t depose May. If she goes, the unwritten laws of politics determine there will be another general election.
Corbyn would win, so the private polling tells Government ministers and their Labour opposition.
That is why the Labour conference felt like a happy-clappy, revivalist version of communion and the Tory one like a wake without the whisky.
We’re in a crazy situation in which Corbyn is only strong because of Theresa May’s weakness and she, enfeebled yet in office, must cling on to keep him out of power.
Ministers now fear Corbyn more than the consequences of Brexit. Yet the Tories can hardly go calling him a Marxist when the best ideas they can
come up with at conference are chasing Labour’s tail on public housing and regulating the energy market.
Before they face their nemesis, the Tories must first confront their own demons.
Until he trampled over the dead of Libya in search of another cheap line, Boris Johnson was a contender.
The buffoon did everything he could to wreck May’s conference, until a pro took over with the mock P45.
On Wednesday, he’d have let May stew onstage until Amber Rudd got him to his feet for the ovation that gave the PM breathing space.
At least Rudd knew what to do. She’s someone you’d want by your side in the trenches, a ballsy woman in the mould of Ruth Davidson.
For all that was made of the conference darling, Davidson’s prospects of leading the Tories remain remote. All that talk of Ken Clarke bequeathing her a safe seat is desperate.
Davidson has had a good run but not yet walked a mile in a Minister’s shoes. She’s handcuffed to Nicola Sturgeon, stuck in Scotland until only one of them wriggles free from the Houdini sack of independence in which they are both bound.
The old hand at the dinner table might have had the theory of Downing Street survival blown away but I suspect they were correct in predicting that none of the top three favourites will be the next leader.
Which makes you careful of what you wish for. As I said, a Leadsom speech would have been far worse.