A week is a long time in politics, and the days grow short as you reach September. Teresa May began last week with a victory, the passage of the EU withdrawal bill, previously known as the “Great Repeal Bill,” through the House of Commons. But her week ended with a harbinger of defeat. On Friday, May’s foreign secretary Boris Johnson informally announced his intent to replace her, by whispering his positions for Brexit negotiations with Brussels and his ambitions for post-Brexit Britain in the discreet setting of a 4,000-word essay for the London Telegraph.
And the week started so well. Last Monday, every single Conservative member of Parliament endorsed the withdrawal bill. The bill passed, 326-290. May could claim that she was capable of running a government, and of delivering the Brexit that the British public chose in June 2016, and which, according to polls, they still choose, despite the lack of early progress in negotiations with Brussels.
There were cavils. The next step in the bill’s legislative progress will be slowed by the addressing of 157 amendments. Some were added by senior Conservative MPs whose objections are both philosophical and procedural. Before June 2016, a majority of Conservative parliamentarians wanted Britain to remain in the EU. The party membership and the constituency voters differed. The Remainer MPs prefer not to lose their seats by openly opposing the electorate, but they are trying to weaken the bill, to produce a “Soft Brexit” whose softness will be so downy and restful that no one will notice that post-Brexit Britain’s relations with the EU will closely resemble those of pre-Brexit Britain.
There are also procedural objections on the Conservative benches. Some of these objections are shared by Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party, as well as the Liberal Democrats, who raise high-minded objections to any legislation in which they do not have a hand. Yet there are good grounds for concern. The very term “withdrawal bill” is a euphemism for a dirty process.
After four decades of sliding into the maw of Brussels, British law is entirely entangled with European Union law. There is not enough time to extricate British law before March 2019, when Brexit negotiations are meant to end. To avoid legislative and economic chaos, the withdrawal bill proposes to ingest European law into British law and then excrete the parts of it that are no longer desirable. The government will decide which parts of European law are to be absorbed into Britain’s gut, and which expelled as waste and hot air. Not for the first time, Parliament finds itself compared to the business end of the alimentary canal.
Last week, Labour, which had halfheartedly endorsed Brexit in the 2016 referendum, cited this procedural concern and voted against the bill. Labour’s left had always had philosophical doubts about Brexit; Jeremy Corbyn campaigned for Brexit through gritted teeth, to avoid alienating the shrinking Labour vote in the ex-industrial cities of northern England.
The opponents of the withdrawal bill warned of Teresa May and her Cabinet annexing “Henry VIII powers.” Sir Keir Starmer, Labour’s shadow secretary for Brexit, called the withdrawal bill “a naked power grab.” The Liberal Democrat spokesman Tom Brake called Monday “a dark day for the mother of all parliaments.” A couple of protesters even turned up at Westminster dressed as Henry VIII and one of his wives.
This was before Boris Johnson, the Henry VIII of modern British politics, launched the mother of all naked power grabs. In Friday’s Telegraph article, Johnson revived the campaign promises that won the Brexit referendum. With or without a deal with Brussels, Britain can reshape itself as the low-tax, low-regulation, hi-tech, and high-growth alternative to the overtaxed and overregulated European Union. Johnson even revived the highly disputed claim that the £350 million per week that Britain sends to the EU would be spent on resuscitating Britain’s flat-lining National Health Service.
Johnson’s timed his challenge perfectly: Right after the passage of the withdrawal bill, and just before Wednesday, when Teresa May will deliver an update on Brexit. He has also upstaged his prime minister before the Conservatives’ annual party conference in early October. And he has stolen a march on the two other candidates for the succession, Brexit secretary David Davis, who favors a “Hard Brexit,” and chancellor Philip Hammond, who whispers Soft Brexit nothings to the press while Davis is negotiating in Brussels.
In June’s general election, May failed to connect with the public and the party lost seats in an election she did not have to call. Afterward, the big Conservative players huddled into her Cabinet to avoid a second electoral embarrassment. Better to endure an informal alliance with the social conservatives and Protestant nationalists of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party—a “coalition of chaos,” some warned, with the potential to wreck the Conservative Party’s recent efforts to win the center ground. Better too to let May take responsibility for the early stages of Brexit negotiations with Brussels, and the stonewalling of the EU negotiators.
The summer recess was quiet. The memory of the election was still fresh, and there was plotting to be done. The passage of the withdrawal bill was the House of Commons’ first important job after the opening of the new session. It may well turn out to be the high point of Teresa May’s tenure. Between Monday night’s vote and Friday morning’s newspapers, she had a three-day Indian summer.
Maxwell Anderson, who wrote “the days grow short” for Kurt Weill’s “September Song,” also wrote the script for the 1948 play Anne of a Thousand Days. This depicted the short reign and bloody end of Henry VIII’s second wife Anne Boleyn, the one for whom Henry conducted the proto-Brexit that shaped the English polity. If we had to guess which of Henry’s wives turned up in costume outside Parliament last week, it would have to be Anne, who failed to produce a son and ended up losing her head.
Teresa May has been prime minister since July 2016. She is not yet halfway toward a thousand days in office, and already her head is on the block. May has produced statements of intent for Brexit, but her lack of charisma and the standoff in the negotiations in Brussels have failed to convince. Like Anne Boleyn, Teresa May has been exploited by more powerful men.
After the June 2016 referendum and David Cameron’s resignation, Johnson seemed to be a short sprint from the top job. He was tripped up, however, by Michael Gove, his erstwhile partner in the Brexit campaign. Over the weekend, after Sir David Norgrove of the U.K. Statistics Authority had contradicted Johnson’s claims about the value of Britain’s contributions to the EU, Gove defended Johnson. Both, amazingly, are still in May’s Cabinet.
The fall of Margaret Thatcher was as grand and sordid as tragedy. She went down like Caesar, the people’s choice to the end, but stabbed in the back by her friends and advisors. Teresa May’s end—it is hard to call it a fall, for she rose only to office, not power—will, like the invocations of “Henry VIII powers” and the appearance of Anne Boleyn’s ghost, tend toward the repetitions of farce. But it will be no less cruel.
May will look ridiculous when she speaks in Florence this week. If she disagrees with Johnson, it will be as if she is picking a fight she cannot win. If she agrees, she will look like his puppet. October’s party conference will be worse. Like Anne Boleyn on the block, May will be honored as a queen. But the court all know that her value was always that of a pawn.
The axe is raised. It may be days, weeks or months before it falls; as Maxwell Anderson observed, it is a long, long time from May to December. Johnson will gather his allies, and be sure not to bungle it second time around. The moment of his greatest advantage will be Teresa May’s moment of greatest weakness. Someone should do the decent thing, and put her out of her misery. But then, this is politics.
