Papering over the many cracks at 10 Downing Street

AFEW months ago, it would have been most unlikely that British people would have gazed across the English Channel and wished our government was more like the French one. But that was before the self-assured Emmanuel Macron took over from the chaotic Francois Hollande – and, more pertinently, before Theresa May made such an appalling job of our General Election and its immediate aftermath.

Mr Macron, who inflicted a painful defeat on France’s traditional ruling parties, has now seen his own, centrist outfit do very well in the first round of parliamentary elections (albeit on a low turnout). “France is back”, enthused his French prime minister. Would that we could be as optimistic about our own country’s prospects.

Even the timing of the Queen’s Speech, the centrepiece of next Monday’s State Opening of Parliament, has been dragged into a sump of uncertainty and confusion that becomes more dispiriting by the day. As The Herald pointed out yesterday, the date of June 19 has been in the Queen’s diary since April.

The official line from the Government is that because the words of the Queen’s Speech need to be inscribed on thick goatskin parchment (in reality, high-grade archival paper), the ink will take several days to dry, thus ruling out last-minute alterations to the text. In truth, of course, ministers are still engaged in talks with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) about the terms of a deal to prop up May’s minority administration.

It has also been reported that there is a Tory-majority speech on goatskin paper, all prepared, but that, of course, was before the election result upset every calculation.

Labour describes the Queen’s Speech delay as “chaos”. While you would not expect them to use a milder word in the circumstances, the news does very little to restore long-term confidence in Mrs May. How much ground is she having to concede to the DUP? Might a

DUP pact, as the Irish Prime Minister, Enda Kenny, warns, jeopardise the province’s peace process, amid questions about the British Government’s ability to remain utterly impartial? Some Tory MPs have voiced concerns that a DUP deal may even scupper the Good Friday Agreement.

The Brexit negotiations are also due to start next Monday. How can Mrs May possibly devote her full energies to them when details of the DUP deal have still to be finalised? Nicola Sturgeon has called on her to pause the negotiations to permit a crossparty, “four-nation” consensus on the UK’s approach.

You could be charitable and say all of this is down simply to a government scrambling to meet tight deadlines and heeding Mrs May’s parting words in Downing Street on Saturday: “Now, let’s get to work”. But it is impossible to forget that all of this is also down exclusively to her hubris in calling an unnecessary election in the first place and in making such a wretched job of it. It is increasingly difficult to take her seriously now.