The next Conservative leader must learn from Theresa May’s mistakes

The winner of this contest will face up to a no-deal Brexit, but will also be realistic about its effects

‘Beware of pity”, I kept saying to myself. It was sad to watch someone who has tried so hard being forced to admit defeat, and painful to see the tears start into her eyes. But I still say “Beware of pity” because, if Theresa May’s account of what went wrong is accepted, the same mistakes will be repeated.

Mrs May quoted the late, great rescuer of children from the Nazis, Sir Nicholas Winton: “Never forget that compromise is not a dirty word.” Indeed. But she never did compromise with differing views about Brexit within her party and agree a negotiating position. Instead, she developed a position in secret, and did not sell it frankly for what it was. The whole thing, including the dreaded backstop, was her way of staying in a version of the customs union, but she would not admit it. Her often repeated statement that “No deal is better than a bad deal” was insincere. Brussels knew it, so they knew they could squash her.

When she started to suffer resignations and then parliamentary defeats because of this, Mrs May made no compromises with Brexiteers. When they themselves ( joining with some former Remainers) offered the “Malthouse compromise”, she rejected it. When the Brady amendment – almost the only thing in this saga that Parliament ever approved – sought a way through the backstop problem, she promised to argue for it with the EU, but did not do so.

Her reaction to repeated defeats was not to try to understand the critics but to treat them as if they were slow learners and force them to vote on the same thing again and again. Towards the end, she did attempt compromise, but only with Labour Remainers – trying to slip in provision for a second referendum which her own Cabinet had just rejected. That was the last straw.

In her resignation statement, Mrs May also said that she had “not been able to persuade” Parliament to agree to her way forward. This was perfectly accurate, and is the key to her leadership problem. What is political leadership – especially in an age of 24-hour news and of social media – but a continuous act of explaining and persuading? She said she had “tried three times”. Whatever she tried, it was not persuasion.

So the story of Theresa May is not the tragedy of an honourable woman who fell among thieves – though she is certainly someone who believes in honour – but of a person unsuited to the task. This became apparent in the course of the 2017 general election. If her party is to be blamed for what happened next, it is not for its ruthlessness, but for its hesitation. Most – this column included – argued then that it was her job to clear up the mess. We were wrong. It was her job to go. Two years have been wasted.

One of the weird consequences of those years was that the argument about the best way to leave the EU never really happened. That may sound an extraordinary thing to say, since we have all debated Brexit ad nauseam. What I mean is that both sides, seeing the vacuum at the centre of power, dug in. There was no honest conversation about how to honour the referendum. Moves to reach across the House of Commons were not sincere attempts to enact the result, but semi-covert attempts to frustrate it.

So what should happen now? It is rightly pointed out that Mrs May is but the latest Tory Prime Minister to be brought down by Europe. Why does this process repeat itself? It happened to Mrs Thatcher because her party elites were so strongly pro-european that they could crush her. Partly because of that event, they have never been so strong since. Every succeeding leader in government – John Major, David Cameron, Mrs May – has been in the false position of leading a party whose majority views they have not shared. They have therefore grossly underplayed the enormous change in public opinion over 30 years.

Even after 17.4 million voices told Tory Remainers how out of touch they were, they still could not hear the message. Mrs May did realise she must try to take Britain out. But she seems never to have wondered why people voted Leave in such vast numbers, defying all the main political parties as they did so. She therefore concocted a deal which missed the point, confining our trade and interfering with our borders.

As we shall almost certainly learn from the European election results on Sunday night, three years of Establishment assault on our supposed stupidity in voting Leave have not changed our minds. Democracy has little meaning unless it involves self-government: that is what, democratically, we were saying. We are still saying it.

In all this, we have never had a Leave government, so it is hardly surprising we have not left. To overcome that issue of trust, the next Conservative leader has to be a Leaver; not someone who has come to it late; not someone who went along with Mrs May’s deal even after its full horror became clear. He (it looks as if it won’t be she) has to start from no-deal because it is the only floor on which any negotiating position can be built. Mrs May removed that floor and so fell to her political death.

The mistake some Brexiteers have made, however, is to spook waverers with their insouciance. The winner of this contest will not be someone who breezily says everything will be fine under a WTO exit and then has no answer to the detailed questions from troubled farmers or “just in time” manufacturers. It will be someone who “kitchen-sinks” the question and points out what he thinks will be bad, what won’t be, and how to help those hardest hit.

He will actually be less annoying to the EU than Mrs May. What theocrats like Michel Barnier hate is violating what he calls EU “principles”. The May idea of a “deep and special partnership” with a country which was leaving did his learned head in. It is illogical (and emotionally weird) to try to get cuddly with a partner you are breaking up with. The more straightforward basis for a future relationship is to say, “We are getting out completely, and we want to do a normal trade deal, such as Donald Tusk offered in March 2018, please. If you do not like it, we shall leave with no deal on October 31.”

It is true that, since the Conservatives have no overall majority, it needs only a tiny handful of their Remain bitter-enders to join Labour and defeat their newly chosen leader. If they do so, however, they will prove that the party really is ungovernable, and provoke a general election which will give Jeremy Corbyn his best chance ever. Even they may decide that this is not quite what they want.

In the days when there was a lot of the stuff around, people used to talk about a “wall of money” moving for something. There is the political equivalent of a wall of money waiting to move for a Brexit that the government of the country believes in. When it does move, Mr Corbyn will be trapped and Nigel Farage will fade away.

Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that I have not named any candidate. No, because every one of them needs to undergo in advance that test of persuasiveness which Mrs May so disastrously failed.

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