Time’s up, Mrs May. You’re the cause of Tory woes
As home secretary for six years, she promised to bring down immigration, but the incoming traffic across the UK’s borders barely paused. On her first day as Prime Minister, she said she’d turn the Tories into the party of the working poor but has only tinkered with, rather than transformed, tax and welfare policies.
After David Cameron won the unwinnable general election in 2015, Theresa May conspired to lose the unlosable election last year – throwing away a 20-point lead and the Tories’ majority. She insisted that Brexit meant Brexit – but only 9 per cent of Britons prefer her Chequers plan to other interpretations of the referendum vote to leave. At last October’s Tory conference, she announced it was her mission to eliminate the housing crisis but her flagship council housing policy would need to be 60 times bigger to provide the number of new homes needed each year by young families.
Tory MPs should have ended her leadership of the Conservative Party in the immediate aftermath of the election disaster. She hasn’t survived because her parliamentary colleagues believe her promise to lift them out of the mess she confessed to landing them in. She’s survived because they’re scared of a messy leadership contest and worried that the new leader may be worse than the nurse they desperately still cling to.
But, at some point, they’ll have to summon up the courage to oust Mrs May. They’re kidding themselves if they think she’ll make it easy. I know via an indiscretion from one of her closest allies that she dearly wants to continue as PM even once a Brexit deal is completed (or, more likely, is fudged). For every person who has ever held the keys to it, No10 is almost never vacated voluntarily.
Once Brexit is legally executed she’ll likely ask for a few months to bed things down. She’ll then argue she’s best placed to manage the transitional arrangements. While it’s hand-to-mouth, month-by-month incrementalism the clock is ticking. Those months will become half-years and then half-years will add up to whole parliamentary sessions that a bold prime minister could be using to deliver the change that millions of Britons so desperately crave. But Britain’s second female prime minister is not the reformer that the first was. Some saw her Thatcheresque speech responding to her Salzburg savaging as a “lady’s not for turning” moment. In reality it was another “lady’s not for learning” pointer to how she keeps repeating the same mistakes. Chequers – conceived without the knowledge of key ministers – has not survived contact with Leavers, Remainers or with Brussels. Lessons that should have been learnt from her disastrous bunker-made dementia tax have not been learnt. The fallout from that hated tax plan was a collapse in the Tories’ electoral fortunes. This time it could be the squandering of the Brexit opportunity – or something even worse.
Jeremy Corbyn shouldn’t be e underestimated. Labour is well-resourced, masterful in social media and relatively united. Three things that can’t be said of May’s party. And while I may not like his policies they look like they’re as big as the housing, wage and infrastructure challenges that the nation faces. If Tories want
at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion to win the battle of ideas it’s helpful to have ideas. The vacuum where they should be and the drift of the Government can’t just be blamed on the demands of Brexit negotiations.
Other big contributory causes are the PM PM’s flip-flopping, hot-and-cold attitud attitude to business; her preference for risk-av risk-averse ministers that she can contro control; and an unwillingness to explor explore coalitions with other parties that m might compensate for her own lack of majority. With Labour, for examp example, on housing and the Lib Dems and SN SNP on devolution. If the Tories can su survive for the whole of this parlia parliament they’ll have been in power for 12 years. If 2022’s voters don’t feel that meaningful change is well under way by then, they’ll turn to the Opp Opposition and its promises – even if the they look a bit risky. That’s the pru prudent conclusion to draw from the global electoral pastings being suff suffered by establishment parties. On One quarter of this parliament has alre already been lost for the sowing of see seeds for change. How many more was wasted months are Tory MPs going to to tolerate?