Cabinet has been complicit in this disaster

Ministers must understand why natural conservatives are now deserting the Tory party in their droves

To say that the Prime Minister’s woeful “Charing Cross” speech backfired is the biggest understatement since Jim Lovell contacted Nasa from Apollo 13 to tell them: “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” Yet it is easy to see why the backlash has been so strong.

During the referendum campaign, the Government spent £9.3 million of taxpayers’ money telling every household that “this is your decision. The Government will implement what you decide.” After the referendum, in which more people voted Leave than have ever voted for anything in British history, the 2017 Conservative manifesto pledged that the UK would leave the single market, the customs

union and the jurisdiction of the European Court. Page 36 said that “no deal is better than a bad deal”.

I wrote in this newspaper two weeks ago that Theresa May had reneged on all but one of her promises. Allowing for a second referendum in her Withdrawal Agreement Bill, as she announced on Tuesday night as part of her “10-point offer”, was the final betrayal. But how did we get to this stage? Ministers are, at long last, taking action against Mrs May. And the blame for the desperate straits the Tory party finds itself in must, of course, fall squarely on Mrs May herself. But why has it taken Cabinet ministers, including Andrea Leadsom, so long to act? The truth is that they are all complicit in allowing matters to reach this point.

Over the past few months, they completely failed to understand the public mood and the enormous strength of feeling which has erupted since the UK failed to leave the EU on March 29. They might have noticed a little extra turbulence, but they were still comfortably flying in business class, eating good food, sipping champagne, enjoying agreeable company. Yet all the while they were wilfully ignoring the fact that the pilot had turned off the engines.

All along, the Cabinet has had the power to act – to take the controls before it was too late – yet it consistently chose not to. Ministers saw the results of the local elections last month, in which 1,330 Conservative councillors and 44 councils were lost, and turned a blind eye. They have seen the dire state of the opinion polls, which put the Conservatives on just 7 per cent for the European elections and 24 per cent for Westminster even before Mrs May delivered her speech on Tuesday.

Dismissing the surging support and membership of the Brexit Party, as some have sought to do, as an ugly revolt by the “populist Right” ignored survey after survey on public attitudes which do not bear this out. To take one example, polling in March revealed that support for immigration has more than doubled in the past eight years, making the UK the most positive country in the world towards immigration.

So changing leader is not enough. Ministers must take this opportunity to reflect seriously on why so many natural conservatives are leaving our party to support one that has only existed for a few weeks. It is not because they have suddenly become radicalised. It is not because they are desperate to get the wretched Withdrawal Agreement “over the line”. It is because they recognise the fundamental importance of trust in democracy.

The whole Cabinet must bear responsibility for the Government’s failures. They are all to blame for not warning the Prime Minister off her disastrous strategy. They are all to blame for failing to tell her that her time was up months ago. They are all to blame for failing to stop that appalling speech on Tuesday night.

If the Conservatives want to stem the tide of members, activists and voters deserting the party, if we want to be listened to on any subject, we must deliver on the promises we have been making for nearly three years, scrapping the Withdrawal Agreement and taking the UK out of the EU by Oct 31.

We must seek to negotiate a wide-ranging trade agreement, but we must be prepared, if necessary in the interim, to go to WTO terms. We need a new prime minister and a new Cabinet to achieve that. It is the only way to repair the trust which Mrs May and her Cabinet so completely eroded.