Last week, Theresa May lost the vote on her EU deal by the biggest margin in the history of Parliament. Nigel Farage has called her the worst prime minister in living memory. She is certainly the luckiest, for no matter how many political disasters she seems to preside over, she still has the keys to Number 10.
As a confirmed cabinet Remainer, she was on the losing side in the 2016 referendum. Yet after David Cameron’s subsequent and speedy abdication, she was handed his premiership and put in charge of implementing the very Brexit she had just voted against.
In an ill-judged attempt to increase her administration’s numbers, she called an election one year later and managed to lose the first outright majority her party had enjoyed in Parliament in 18 years.
In July 2018, she held a summit at Chequers, the PM’s official country residence. Billed as a get-together with her cabinet to discuss progress on the EU deal, ministers soon discovered that it was no longer quite the plan they had been negotiating. Instead, May had been working with a team of civil servants to produce a deal that would keep Britain closer to the EU than some ministers wanted.
To avoid press leaks, she had cellphones removed and told her cabinet that if they chose to resign, they would immediately lose their official cars and would have to walk the long, green mile back to the entrance gates, where the paparazzi would be waiting. Not surprisingly, none chose that fate. But soon afterward, Brexit Secretary David Davis and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson did resign. In the six months since then, another 18 cabinet ministers have quit in protest.
In December, May survived a no-confidence vote as prime minister, called when she delayed her first attempt to get her EU deal though Parliament. After surviving that vote, new party rules mean that she cannot now be challenged for another year. Around the same time her government was found guilty of contempt of Parliament.
May has also benefited hugely from the five-year, fixed-term Parliaments Act brought in by her predecessor to ensure that an election can only be called outside those periods if a government loses a no-confidence vote. As Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn discovered last week, this is no easy task.
Following the savage rejection of her EU deal, Parliament demanded she reveal alternative exit plans within three days, so on Monday she announced, well, not too many alternatives: She doesn’t want a second referendum or to delay the leave date. She instead proposes some modest changes to her existing deal, making Plan B look an awful lot like Plan A, maybe Plan A-plus.
By continuing to present her EU deal as the only one in town for so long, she looks to have made it so. Parliamentary time is now short, and Brussels has shown little desire to start another round of negotiations, so Britain is currently heading for a no-deal exit on March 29. If other plans emerge that need longer, it will require the Withdrawal Act to be changed, and that will not be easy.
In fairness, May sought a deal that would placate, if not unite, Leavers, Remainers, and the EU too, but she has ended up pleasing very few. Yet with nothing now in sight to replace it, her negotiating strategy may have unwittingly given Brexiteers what they wanted: a World Trade Organization default trade deal.
For two years, Lord Peter Lilley, a former Conservative trade and industry secretary, has been arguing the benefits of trading with WTO rules, which he helped to negotiate back in 1994. He claims that all of its tariffs combined will still be substantially less than Britain’s current annual EU contributions, not to mention the $50 billion pay-to-play settlement that May agreed to before the EU would even look at her deal.
If the prime minister’s EU deal is finally rejected and she allows the WTO outcome to proceed unhindered, she could still gain the respect and gratitude of the Brexit voting majority. “No-deal” could prove to be a very big deal for her indeed.
Andrew Davies is a UK-based video producer and scriptwriter.
