Weak and wobbly May needs to take a Major step
( and risk ending up like ousted Maggie )
IF Theresa May’s premiershipwas a movie it would surely be entitled John Major II – although the sequel is bloodier and more brutal than the original. Both started with majorities – and although their unexpected election results differ – ended uprunning dysfunctional minority governments.
No one in their own parties believed they could win another election but they were held because the Tory Party – riven with divisions over Europe – couldn’t agree upon a successor.
That is particularly true of Mrs. May. Deadlock keeps the ‘dead woman’ walking.
The Brexit referendum has not settled the European issue ‘once and for all’ for the Tories as was billed, it has merely hastened the party to the final conflict.
No one has wanted to challenge her for the job because everyone knows that whatever final Brexit deal is struck, no one will be happy. No one wants the blame.
Her would-be successors have decided that however frustrating, waiting may be the better part of ambition.
Yet while they have bided their time, Mrs May’s procrastination is provoking them into action.
Her victories have been few and have come from the unlikeliest of sources. The end of the first phase of Brexit negotiations was saved from disaster not by her, or anyone in her cabinet, but by the generosity of spirit of EU Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker and EU president Donald Tusk, who cut a deal.
Since then, if she hasn’t been exactly firefighting, she has been going through a series of fire drills as her Cabinet colleagues try less to undermine her – there is little to undermine – but to set out their own stalls.
Mrs May might have gone into last year’s election as the nation’s headmistress but she emerged from it at best as a supply teacher and her punishments for disloyalty have been weakened as a result.
When Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson set out his vision for Brexit to pre-empt her keynote Florence speech he got a severe talking to when the belt – or the boot – would have been a more fitting punishment.
Again, this week, when he trailed demands for more health spending ahead of cabinet, No 10 merely stressed how confidential their meetings are while leaking how badly this one had gone for him and how unpopular he is in the common room.
A few days later, when Chancellor Philip Hammond argued at Davos for a ‘soft Brexit’, even though he talked of leaving the single market and the customs union, he had to be chastised.
Evenhandedness in Mrs May’s No 10 is not in proportion to the crime, it is to slap each side equally – and equally limply.
Davos was another sign of her weakness. Famously, Margaret Thatcher said Mikhail Gorbachev was a man she ‘could do business with’. At Davos, Mrs May’s highpoint was when President Trumpshook her hand and suggested he could do business with her – when so many of his business dealings are being investigated by the Feds.
It is time that Mrs May went back to the original script of the movie she is trapped in. Time she stood upto her critics and told them to put up and shut up. Rather than die the death of a thousand cuts, she should be prepared to wield the knife.
Notoriously thorough, the Prime Minister will have seen all the evidence the civil service has collated on the different shapes of Brexit by now. She must have a preferred option.
Now she should impose it and ask her colleagues – as John Major did – to put up or shut up, back her or sack her. It didn’t solve the Tory divisions over Europe – nothing can – but Major’s defeat of John Redwood in 1995 did shore up his authority for the next two years.
If they don’t back her, she should resign as leader and announce she is standing in the subsequent election, as he did. The vote will only go to the party membership if she is opposed but the parliamentary Tory party has no candidate to unite around.
Even if more than one candidate thinks about standing, they are playing a dangerous game.
If the Tory Party defeats a Prime Minister elected by the British public, then the pressure to hold another general election could be too strong to bear. Surely even for the biggest Brexiteer or Remainer, the prospect of a Jeremy Corbyn victory is too great to risk.
THIS differs from the dethroning of Margaret Thatcher in 1990. The party was united on two things then – her time was done and Michael Heseltine should not succeed her. Mrs Thatcher – the democratically elected prime minister – withdrew from the leadership contest undefeated. Mrs May should challenge her critics to defeat her.
Caution has served Mrs May better throughout her career than recklessness. How she must regret calling last year’s election.
But having started down that path it is too late to turn back. There is no deal she can fashion that will unite Ken Clarke and Jacob ReesMogg. None that can calm the ambition of Boris Johnson.
Gordon Brown faced at least three coup attempts when he was Prime Minister. Then there was a single candidate many colleagues had coalesced around – David Miliband. Each one he faced down personally.
Theresa May should do the same or she is merely a dead woman who has lost the ability to walk.