Nick TIMOTHY
Mrs May has paid the price for failing to embrace Brexit and betraying the voters who wanted it
‘All political lives,” said Enoch Powell, “end in failure.” For Theresa May, the agony of the ending, and the failure, has been drawn out for longer than usual. But in the coming days, it is certain that her premiership will draw to a close.
The Cabinet’s patience has been finally snapped by the Prime Minister’s latest tone-deaf Brexit proposal. Andrea Leadsom has resigned. MPS say there isn’t a single colleague who thinks the PM should continue.
Any Conservative made nervous by the prospect of regicide will find their minds made up by today’s European election results.
The Government’s failure to deliver Brexit – and its continued attempts to produce a Brexit deal seen by many Leavers as a betrayal – has unleashed Nigel Farage and his Brexit Party. They will top the polls today, and the Tories will be lucky to win 10 per cent of the vote. It will be their worst ever performance in a national election.
Three years ago, when Mrs May first arrived in Downing Street, there were few signs that it would end this badly.
Her tenure as home secretary, which lasted more than six years, had been a success. She reformed the police and – despite budget cuts – reduced crime. She cracked down on extremists and – from deaths in custody to the Hillsborough disaster – she confronted injustice without fear or favour.
As Prime Minister, she started brightly. Her address from the steps of Downing Street struck a chord with ordinary families who felt neglected by the political establishment. On Brexit, she gave a clear lead, explaining that Britain would not seek membership of the EU’S single market or customs union, and would instead pursue a free-trade agreement and close security relationship.
Yet even in those early days the warning signs were there.
On the international stage, she was cautious and guarded and failed to strike a rapport with other world leaders. At home, she made bold promises – on house-building, putting workers on company boards, reducing the cost of energy bills, protecting soldiers from “lawfare”, and more – which her timid approach to policy could not deliver.
Believing she had a good personal relationship with Philip Hammond, she made him Chancellor. But within weeks their relationship was bitter and rancorous. Looking back, her relations with colleagues were often poor because she neither trusted them nor even knew them well.
The honeymoon she enjoyed with the voters came to a crashing end in the election of 2017. Her early political strategy had seen the Conservatives assume a lead of more than 20 points over Labour in the opinion polls, and she was ahead of Jeremy Corbyn in every nation and region of the UK, with men and women, every social class and every age group. But the election was a disaster.
It was called too late, the campaign was too long, and the Conservative strategy was confused. The manifesto, which I jointly authored, backfired over its controversial social care policy. And the Prime Minister – thrust into the limelight for the first time – performed poorly on television and on the campaign trail.
Despite everything, the Conservatives won 42.4 per cent of the vote – their highest share since 1983 – but Labour surged too. Instead of winning a big majority, as she had hoped, the PM found herself with no majority at all, and had to cobble together a confidence-and-supply agreement with the Democratic Unionist Party.
But the loss of the Conservative majority does not explain the changes in her Brexit policy since the election.
In switching from the policy she proposed at Lancaster House, in her Article 50 letter and in her manifesto, to the muddy mess of the Chequers policy and the Withdrawal Agreement, the Prime Minister lost huge swathes of support. No fewer than 118 Tory MPS voted against the Withdrawal Agreement the first time it was put to the Commons.
If she had stuck to her original plan and delivered a clean Brexit, she could have kept her party largely together and retained the support of the DUP. She might have fallen short in the House of Commons, but she could have threatened Labour MPS in Leave-supporting constituencies: vote for Brexit, or face your betrayed voters.
Instead, it is the Prime Minister who voters feel has betrayed them. She negotiated a Withdrawal Agreement she knew her party – and the Commons – opposed. She ran down the clock, believing Parliament would buckle. She refused to negotiate alternative arrangements to the hated backstop after Parliament had instructed her to do so.
She did these things because the EU had outmanoeuvred her in the negotiations, because Remainers in the Cabinet pressed her into a softer Brexit, and because, deep down, she sees leaving the EU as little more than a damage limitation exercise.
It is a sorry ending to the career of a dutiful and earnest public servant. But as Enoch Powell said, “that is the nature of politics and of human affairs”. The race to succeed her has already begun.