A new chapter after three wasted years
May’s misfortune was to take office in circumstances that required political and diplomatic skills that she lacked
How will history judge Theresa May’s period in Number 10, which comes to an end today? Her tenure of three years and 12 days is not the shortest of recent times, having surpassed that of Gordon Brown, and is only marginally behind James Callaghan’s. She is the second woman to occupy the post – both Tories, it should be said – and the fourth Conservative prime minister in succession laid low by Europe.
She assumed office in July 2016 after the resignation of David Cameron following the Brexit referendum vote, and arrived armed with a radical domestic agenda that never saw the light of day. The reason is that her premiership was consumed entirely by Brexit, the attempts to deliver it and the calamitous failure to do so.
Mrs May was a Remainer during the referendum campaign, albeit a self-styled reluctant one. But since Brexit was the cause of the crisis that brought Mr Cameron down, the task of securing the UK’S withdrawal should have fallen to a Brexiteer. Indeed, it should have fallen to Boris Johnson.
Three years on and what should have happened then has happened now. Mr Johnson will today go to Buckingham Palace to kiss hands with the Queen and return to Downing Street as prime minister. Unfortunately, those wasted three years have made a task that was difficult enough at the time much harder.
The way the negotiations with the EU were conducted – and especially the inclusion of the relationship with Ireland in the Withdrawal Agreement – has led to entrenched positions being adopted that have made a deal far more difficult to achieve.
The problems caused by the sequencing of the talks were compounded by Mrs May’s greatest mistake – calling an election that cost her the parliamentary majority she inherited from her predecessor. There was a perfectly good rationale for that decision: she needed a substantial Commons majority to overcome the objections to Brexit she knew she would encounter.
Ironically, she won a bigger share of the vote than any Tory leader since Margaret Thatcher in 1983 but lost her majority. By ending up in a worse position than before, with the balance of power held by the one party that would not countenance treating Northern Ireland differently from the rest of the UK, she was stymied.
She tried hard, of that there is no doubt, often answering questions in the Commons for hours on end and undertaking a punishing schedule of meetings in pursuit of Brexit that would have floored many people half her age. But she was temperamentally unable to convince enough parliamentarians, not least the Brexiteers on her own side, that her plan made good on the promises she had made earlier in her premiership.
Announcing the outcome of the leadership contest yesterday, Charles Walker MP said he hoped the party would be kinder to the next prime minister than it had been to Mrs May. Perhaps, in different times, she might have made a good premier. Doggedness and perseverance are qualities that can always be deployed in the national interest but have in this instance proved to be a handicap.
Moreover, as even her own former aide Nick Timothy put it recently, she saw Brexit not as an opportunity but as a damage-limitation exercise. Her misfortune was to take office in circumstances that required the political and diplomatic skills that she lacked.
We are now about to discover whether Mr Johnson can succeed where she failed.
His first task is to construct a Cabinet with the expressed purpose of delivering Brexit by October 31. Its entire focus must be on that endeavour. All domestic policy planning, which has effectively ceased in any case, needs to be put aside to ensure that if the UK has to leave without a deal then it is fully prepared for whatever disruption that might cause. It was encouraging to hear the upbeat tone in Mr Johnson’s words to the party yesterday but now is the time for hard work. There are just 99 days to Brexit. We wish him well.