Cabinet demands May sets a date to quit
Pressure on PM as senior Tories insist it is now a matter of ‘when’ she goes, not ‘if ’
THERESA MAY is under pressure to set out a timetable for her departure after Cabinet ministers said it was now a question of “when, not if” she stands down as Prime Minister.
The Daily Telegraph has been told that discussions have begun about when Mrs May should be ousted if she refuses to leave No 10 before the next general election.
Several Cabinet ministers want her to go immediately after Brexit day in March next year, but others are prepared to give her until 2020, if she uses the next party conference to announce the date of her departure.
They are agreed that Mrs May’s disastrous performance in last year’s election means she cannot be allowed to lead the party into the 2022 poll and that a “new and fresh” leader is needed to rejuvenate the party and kill off the threat of Jeremy Corbyn.
The calls to announce a succession plan mirror the row that dominated Tony Blair’s final year in Downing Street, before he eventually announced in 2007 that he would hand over to Gordon Brown.
Meanwhile, Boris Johnson was given a hero’s welcome by Tory supporters at the Conservative Party conference, where he told a packed fringe event that Mrs May’s Chequers plan for Brexit would “cheat” the electorate.
The former foreign secretary, who was bombarded with questions about a potential leadership challenge as he arrived at the event, drew by far the biggest crowd of the conference, with 1,400 cheering delegates having queued for hours to see him. Mrs May later admitted that Mr Johnson’s latest intervention had made her “cross”, and she went on to suggest that all he was capable of was “putting on a good show”, while another minister dismissed him as a “court jester”.
The Prime Minister also faced fresh problems with her Chequers plan, as the DUP appeared to kill off her proposed solution to the Irish border problem – which would involve an expansion of regulatory checks on goods crossing the Irish Sea.
Mrs May will today make her keynote speech to the conference in Birmingham, when she will say that Britain’s post-brexit future is “full of promise” because the country has “everything we need to succeed”.
In her speech, titled Our Future Is In Our Hands, Mrs May will say “our best days lie ahead of us” as countries around the world stand ready to trade with the UK. But her appearance is likely to be overshadowed by speculation about whether her conference address will be her last as leader.
Mrs May insisted yesterday she was “in it for the long term” but the decision over her future is likely to be taken out of her hands, as her ministers discuss whether to oust her immediately after Brexit or wait until 2020 to wield the knife.
One Cabinet source told The
Telegraph: “There are two schools of thought in the Cabinet. One is that she will be forced out straight after we leave the EU in March next year to bring in a new broom who can rebuild the party before the next election. But there is a growing feeling that
she could be allowed to stay on for longer than that, to get Brexit completely done and dusted so that the next leader can focus completely on domestic policy. That would mean she would be given one more party conference in a year’s time, but she would need to use that conference to announce when she intended to stand down.”
Another source said: “One of the reasons she may be allowed to stay on until 2020 is that most of the party still doesn’t think there is an obvious candidate to replace her who would command widespread support.
“Waiting a little longer would give a younger candidate, maybe someone no one is yet talking about, time to garner support. If you want the party to feel new and fresh going into the next election, you don’t necessarily want someone to be leader for more than a couple of years beforehand.”
While Mr Johnson and Jacob Rees-mogg are favourites among grassroots Tories, MPS will gravitate towards a unity candidate with Cabinet experience, such as Sajid Javid, Jeremy Hunt, Dominic Raab or Penny Mordaunt, with former home secretary Amber Rudd also in the frame. Several contenders have been accused of using their conference speeches to bolster their leadership ambitions, including Mr Hunt, who accused the EU of behaving like the Soviet Union, and Mr Javid, who talked about the need to appeal to ethnic minorities.
Another minister told The Telegraph the Prime Minister must leave by next summer to make way for a leadership contest ahead of the next party conference.
They said the new leader “must not be a Brexiteer” and must be capable of ending the in-fighting which has dominated the party over the last year. Mrs May’s successor must be a proven campaigner, as: “We’ve seen from last year that Theresa isn’t a campaigner. She can’t take us into an election against Labour. It has to be someone who can take them on.”
Dismissing Mr Johnson’s barnstorming fringe speech, Mrs May told the BBC: “If there’s one thing we all know about Boris it’s that he’ll put on a good show … there are one or two things that Boris said that I am cross about. He wanted to tear up our guarantee to the people of Northern Ireland.”
Business minister Claire Perry said of Mr Johnson: “It’s a travelling circus that comes to town. He thrives on publicity. He doesn’t have a policy backbone anywhere on him. Who doesn’t want to see the court jester arrive?”