Allister Heath
Unless the Tories can pull themselves together, Brexit could be halted, and Labour swept to power
Governments often survive sleaze scandals, recessions and even the most disastrous of wars. Few, if any, ever recover when they become laughing stocks, objects of pity and ridicule. That, tragically, is the direction in which Theresa May’s rudderless Government is fast heading: at one point yesterday more than 22,000 people were tracking Priti Patel’s Kenya Airways flight back to Heathrow.
The scenes when she landed were even more farcical, and proof that Downing Street can no longer operate in a dignified manner. Why on earth didn’t anybody see that it wasn’t in the PM’S interests for this sorry saga to dominate the entire day in Westminster? If she really wanted to sack Patel, the Secretary of State for International Development, why didn’t she do it quickly over the phone, and seek to regain control of the news agenda? It wasn’t even that May was looking to humiliate Patel: it was just sheer uselessness of the kind that almost makes me miss the efficiency of Alastair Campbell-style centralised decision making.
Patel, a courageous and vocal supporter of Brexit and Thatcherite economics, has been badly treated. She has unfairly been made to pay the price for the Government’s broader dysfunction, buying it a little more time. Yes, she made a mistake, as she admitted in her letter to the PM. She breached diplomatic protocol and ignored the heavy-handed bureaucratic procedures Cabinet ministers are meant to follow when they meet foreign politicians overseas, even when on holidays. It was a silly misjudgment, and one for which she should have been rebuked. But on the evidence so far it warranted neither her being forced to resign nor the extreme, hysterical reaction triggered in some circles.
Even though Patel’s trips and meetings were not signed off in the proper fashion, they were hardly a secret: pictures and details were widely tweeted, especially by Israeli figures. It is simply not credible to claim that nobody in 10 Downing Street had any idea about any of this.
The real reason Patel has been defenestrated, as ever in these Brexit times, was a mixture of the ideological and the personal. She trod on the Foreign Office’s ultra-sensitive toes when she visited an Israeli military field hospital set up in the Golan Heights to treat Syrian refugees. She then sought to see whether UK aid money could be spent on it, a request that was guaranteed to drive the Arabists who dominate British officialdom mad.
Many readers will doubtless have been attracted to Patel’s idea, even if the UK doesn’t recognise Israeli control of the area; but her request was rejected as “inappropriate”. First Brexit, and then this: it was just too much for her enemies in her own department and the Foreign Office to take, and they decided to stir up as much trouble as they could. The fact that Patel is also on good terms with Narendra Modi, India’s nationalist prime minister, will have put her further beyond the pale.
A Remainer, Sir Michael Fallon, was first to go; now the Leavers have been forced to pay a proportionally greater price by losing one of their stars. Combine that with Patel’s leadership ambitions, which pit her against other Brexiteers such as Boris Johnson, and she needed to tread far more carefully than she did. She made an error, and her many enemies jumped on it. This dreadful saga has also bought Johnson some breathing space from his own, objectively far more serious problems.
Yet for all of yesterday’s farcical twists and turns, the crisis engulfing our weakest government in living memory is no laughing matter. Unless the Tories can somehow pull themselves together, Brexit could be halted, destroying Britain’s sacred and historic compact between elites and people, and Jeremy Corbyn swept to power, inflicting irreparable harm to our economy and society. The Tory party itself wouldn’t survive such a turn of events.
Too many MPS have spent too much of the past few months in a state of delusion. The reality is that Mrs May’s attempts at shrugging off her general election failure and soldiering on valiantly are failing: her Government is slowly falling apart, and yet nobody in the party seems to have the faintest clue as to what should be done about it. The next big test, assuming that the Cabinet can be held together that long and the Budget doesn’t turn into another train crash, will be the European negotiations next month.
If these cannot be spun as a breakthrough, and it starts to look as if no progress will be made on trade talks until later in 2018, the PM will face an even more dramatic threat to her position. In theory, she could then start to prepare in earnest for a no-deal Brexit, but the danger is that her inability to lead and inspire will leave her subject to endless parliamentary rebellions that cripple her ability to work towards such an eventuality. If an orderly Brexit begins to look in real jeopardy, how could she or the Government hope to survive?
The chaos and the back stabbings are merely symptoms of the extreme vacuum at the heart of the Government. The Prime Minister’s lack of power means that every part of the state apparatus is now freelancing, not just Cabinet ministers and the Civil Service. The stridently political intervention by Simon Stevens, the head of the NHS, demanding £350 million in extra spending a week for the service, an amount chosen to mirror Vote Leave’s campaign pledge, was another watershed moment yesterday. If other officials begin to campaign openly to change government policy, the Government’s last shreds of authority will vanish.
May now has only one possible card left to play if she is to regain the initiative. She must substantially reshuffle her Government, promoting as many members of the 2010, 2015 and even 2017 intake as possible. Her reshuffle should have succession planning at its core, giving power to untested MPS to see whether they could be ready, in time, for greater things. She must make sure that there is no reduction in the number of Leavers in the Cabinet, but apart from that no job should be safe.
The Prime Minister was wrong to force out Priti Patel, who will become a powerful force on the backbenches. Mrs May must now either drastically reshape her Government, or wait until it disintegrates completely in the most damaging way possible.