Theresa May needs to make her peace with the Tory liberals

Would the Tory Remainers and the Leavers ever kiss and make up? At the start of the summer, following an acrimonious campaign and facing a brutal, twomonth leadership contest, it seemed an open question.

Wise heads toured news studios claiming that the Right’s wounds would never heal unless the party faithful were given a say on the new prime minister.

They were wrong. Within three weeks, the Conservatives had displayed their famously ruthless efficiency by closing ranks behind one woman. Theresa May had many strikes against her, as far as the Tory Right was concerned. She was a Remainer. She had failed to cut immigration. And she was the kitten-heeled moderniser who had once dubbed the Tories Britain’s “nasty party”.

But she was also the only sensible option available.

It’s a measure of how far the ground has shifted since then that the newest menace to Mrs May’s authority is emerging not on the Right, but on the liberal, Remainer wing of the Conservative Party.

George Osborne let it be known over the summer in Westminster circles that he was not ready to bow out of politics. But on Friday, he went on the radio to plant his flag in the open. He would not be writing his memoirs yet, he said, because: “I don’t know how the story ends.” And just like that, the former chancellor turned himself into a rallying point for Mrs May’s enemies.

She has plenty. She fired 25 MPs from government in July, despite having a majority of just 17. The rejects included almost the entire Cameroon set. Mr Osborne’s defenestration, accompanied by a vicious briefing to the press, was particularly harsh. She implicitly condemned Mr Cameron’s leadership style when she told her new ministers that, “politics is not a game”. She tacked Right by unveiling a new push to open more grammar schools. And she took a pot-shot at Mr Osborne’s legacy by declaring that her Government would be implementing a “proper” industrial strategy.

For his part, the former chancellor knows that Mrs May’s Government is not as stable as it looks. Her honeymoon period with the media is waning and though she has bought off Boris Johnson with a plum posting to the Foreign Office, he is merely biding his time. Ukip, if it can pull together under new leadership, has a chance to gain ground during the EU negotiations.

Now, on her other wing, Mr Osborne is parking his tanks on the liberal centre-ground. He has suggested that grammar schools are a distraction. And he has decided to chair a new pressure group named for his own branding trick, the “Northern Powerhouse”, in a move clearly designed to challenge Number Ten’s ownership of its “industrial strategy”. Both catchphrases sound vaguely Leftwing and so far mean the same thing, which is to say, nothing.

Mrs May is being hemmed in by her rivals ahead of a negotiation in which she will need maximum flexibility. And the country’s stability will be at a premium: the convulsions in global markets that followed the Brexit vote have faded, but the atmosphere could turn febrile again. As Britain and the EU play chicken with one another, there are bound to be bouts of turmoil. Any sense that our Government is about to topple, mid-negotiation, will not be helpful.

Mrs May would always have had plenty of worries on her plate, but the trouble brewing among Tory Remainers is a battle she didn’t have to pick. She seems to have decided long ago that Mr Cameron’s leadership was an exercise in smug, short-sighted cronyism. Yet as she stepped over the self-immolated bodies of her opponents in July, she should have realised that the moment called for a gracious victor. Now, in her manoeuvres both at home and abroad, she will have to plot an uncomfortable course between her party’s strident Brexiteers and its ousted liberals.

One of Gordon Brown’s great failings as a prime minister was that he could never shake off the resentments he had harboured during the decade of Tony Blair’s rule. For him, government was a form of revenge. By defining herself against the Cameroons, Mrs May is at risk of falling into the same trap. She will need friends in the years ahead, even among her old rivals, and Britain needs stability at the top. It’s time to bury the hatchet.