May Poll

One of the wiser observations about politics in this populist age was made by Trump adviser Steve Bannon in February. “If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight,” he said, “you are sadly mistaken.” The identity of “they” may vary from country to country but the fight is the same: Brexit=Trump. The British citizens who thought they had won the right to leave the European Union were not quite correct. They had won the right to fight over the matter with their almost unanimously pro-EU elites.

Brexit could easily have unraveled. The “Leave” side had the democratic elation, but the “Remain” side held better political cards. There was a very serious difficulty in translating a referendum—which has no legitimacy under Britain’s system of parliamentary supremacy—into a law. There was a generously bankrolled public-relations agitation to bully Parliament into calling a second referendum. It was suddenly discovered that regional assemblies and the House of Lords had previously unasserted veto powers. And there was a divided Conservative party, most of whose members were unsympathetic to the democracy movement that had just triumphed.

May scuttled activists’ hopes of reversing the result, declaring on the day she took power: “Brexit means Brexit.” Despite a majority in the House of Commons of only a dozen or so seats, she rallied her own Tory party behind Brexit. She turned it into a patriotic issue.

Her party didn’t know what to think. After the long ascendancy of Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990) and John Major (1990-1997), Tony Blair’s revamped Labour party had drubbed the Tories in one election after another. In 2010 David Cameron squeaked into power with a campaign that sought to “modernize” the party—i.e., to render it understandable to the modern media. He took, for instance, a dogsled ride at the Arctic Circle to show his concern for global warming.

When Cameron was forced to resign in the wake of Brexit, which he had opposed, May seemed an unlikely successor. She had been Cameron’s home secretary, responsible for domestic policy. She was, by temperament, a conservative, but her conservatism was not of the kind that Tories brought up under Thatcher would recognize. She was not an ideologue for the free market. She shocked her party’s 2002 conference by berating those who were. “Our base is too narrow and so, occasionally, are our sympathies,” she said. “You know what some people call us? The nasty party!”

May was a real Middle-Englander, a perfect representative of the world that Brexit was meant to preserve and protect. She was a clergyman’s daughter who attended a state “grammar school,” a highly competitive charter-type school of the sort that May hopes to restore. She went to church every Sunday while at Oxford. In an excellent biographical essay that appeared in the London Review of Books in March, David Runciman reproduced a reminiscence that May had written of her years there. It included this passage: “From sherbet fountains to Corona, from Tommy Steele to Z Cars, from stodgy puddings to Vesta curries; and that’s not to mention the education.” Do you have any idea what any of those things are? If so, you are English.

There was always something cosmopolitan and citizen-of-the-worldish about her three predecessors when they appeared at prime minister’s questions. Blair was orotund and idealistic, Gordon Brown haughty and erudite, Cameron wry and snooty. May has a tough, spitting, man-on-the-street earnestness. “That’s the difference between him and me,” she said of Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who had attacked the grammar schools she still holds dear. “Labour put the party first, we put the country first!”

While May was home secretary, Cameron had made vague promises about dropping net immigration to Britain to under 100,000 per year. It remained in the high hundreds of thousands, not counting university students. May has tried (and failed) to get them included in the total, and showed herself willing to sacrifice participation in the European common market in order to block the free movement of migrants into Britain. She refused to commit to the beefed-up foreign-aid budget with which Cameron sought to appeal to millennials. And at the end of March she triggered Article 50, which set the clock ticking on Britain’s exit from the EU, after securing approval from the House of Commons, in a 498-114 vote. That would seem to be a comfortable enough margin on Brexit. The question naturally arises of why she is risking an election so early in the process.

The short answer is that the Labour party, the Tories’ traditional adversary, is now shockingly weak. Jeremy Corbyn represents Islington, a north London neighborhood that is just swimming in latte. His ideology is very similar to that of Bernie Sanders, with all the nostalgic charm and economic irrelevance that implies. Not all Corbyn’s ideas are bad. He is right, for instance, that privatization of Britain’s railroads has been a failure. But he favors heavier taxes on “the rich”—by which he means those earning $90,000 a year. And he has never quite figured out whether he thinks the European Union is a step forward for international harmony or a devious plot to entrench financial capitalism everywhere. A lot of Britons who would have liked to remain in the EU blame him for last year’s result.

Corbyn seems unaware that the working-class voters on whom his party’s fortunes used to rest have either succumbed or found another political home. Questioned by a journalist about his out-of-touch Islington constituency, he replied, “I am very proud to represent North Islington. .  .  . It’s absolutely true there are people in Islington who buy and drink cappuccino every day. .  .  . It is also true that there are people living in the streets of our borough.” A dozen top Labour MPs have resigned their seats rather than run again under his leadership. A YouGov poll taken for the London Times showed Conservatives running at 48 percent and Labour at 24, which would saddle Corbyn with a loss of as many as 100 seats.

May had promised she would not call an early election. She will pay a certain price for her U-turn. But the prospect of Labour’s getting a new leader and rejuvenating itself, the way Germany’s Social Democrats have done under Martin Schulz this past spring, meant that inaction was more risky than action. Because of May’s reliably pro-Brexit stance, the single-issue UK Independence party, which often erodes the Tories’ anti-European vote, is weak, too. An improving British economy should be generating inflation in theory—and it is the wiser choice, politically, not to wait until it comes in practice. Finally, if May writes Brexit into the Tory party’s governing manifesto, it will place constitutional limits on what the House of Lords—swollen during the Blair, Brown, and Cameron governments by pro-EU human-rights lawyers, community activists, and cultural studies professors—can do to obstruct it. May would have been nuts to delay.

The election will reflect Britain’s new electoral, sociological, and geographical divisions. In the face of Labour’s tergiversation, the Tories’ former coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, have become the no-two-ways-about-it anti-Brexit party—they could rise as Labour withers. What is more, as Labour comes more to represent urban sophisticates, the Tories become more the party of rural England and its basket of deplorables. “There are Conservative MPs in prosperous urban constituencies,” the former Tory strategist Daniel Finkelstein wrote this week, “who will lose their seats in a campaign that centres on Brexit.”

Brexit is now underway, but its outcome is unclear. Britain’s success at the negotiating table will determine whether it gets a “hard Brexit” or a “soft Brexit.” This question has three dimensions: whether Britain will respect European conventions on the free movement of people; whether Britain will remain in the single European free trade zone (the “single market”); and whether Britain will remain subject to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. A soft Brexit would answer yes and a hard Brexit no to those questions.

The situation is paradoxical. May appears to want a soft Brexit on trade and a hard Brexit on everything else. It is against her fellow hardliners, though, that she requires the protection of a large majority. Otherwise she will risk seeing an orderly Brexit hung up by purists the way Republicans saw the repeal of Obamacare hung up last month.

“We want a deep and special partnership between a strong and successful European Union and a U.K. that is making its own way in the world,” May said when announcing the election. This should be easily achievable. Britain’s objections to the EU were the most widespread of any European country’s, but they were in many cases pragmatic. There are no Brexit advocates fustigating the whole capitalist system, the way some of the candidates in France’s presidential election have been doing.

Some of those who speak for the European Union have been inclined to wield access to Europe’s common market as a bargaining chip. They include Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission. They would treat Britain and the continent as bound no more intimately than, say, China and Nigeria; or Taiwan and Brazil. They assume also that the United States would be indifferent to the fate of its most loyal ally in a trade war. That might have been the case during the last administration, when President Obama warned that a Britain outside of Europe would have to go to the “back of the queue” for any future trade deals with Washington. But it is not the case today, and it ignores the large stock of good will that May has already managed to build up inside the Trump administration. An EU inclined to hang Britain out to dry would be risking a big miscalculation.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.