Virginia Woolf said that whenever Charles Dickens felt that a story was faltering in plot or wit, he threw “another handful of people on the fire.” Character, she reckoned, was Dickens’s substitute for the conventional virtues of organization and intelligence. You can go a long way in England on character—all the way to 10 Downing Street. But you cannot stay there without organization and intelligence.
In 1990, after pro-E.U. ministers had stabbed Margaret Thatcher in the back, John Major, a man untroubled by charisma, emerged as the consensus inheritor. After an organized and intelligent campaign, Major won more votes in the 1992 elections than any previous Conservative candidate. Not bad for a character so mild that he tucked his shirt into his underwear just to be on the safe side.
In 2016, after the Brexit referendum, David Cameron’s resignation, and the bungled candidacy of the excessively characterful Boris Johnson, Theresa May tiptoed into Downing Street. She was supposed to be organized and intelligent; she had survived a term at the graveyard of ambition that is the Home Office. She claimed to be capable of holding together a party riven over Europe, of rebinding a nation divided by Europe, and of steering Britain through Brexit. She has turned out to be the worst prime minister in living memory.
First, May lost her parliamentary majority through a poorly organized and foolish electoral campaign in 2017. Then she pursued a disastrous negotiating strategy with the E.U. over Brexit—if, that is, a program of surrender by stages can be called a strategy at all. Finally, in early July, she summoned her cabinet to the prime minister’s weekend home, Chequers, and secured its collective responsibility for a Brexit policy that reneged on her election promises of 2017 and subsequent policy statements.
The façade of unity lasted three days, until two of the stronger characters in the pro-Brexit camp, May’s foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, and her Brexit negotiator, David Davis, threw themselves on the fire. The policy lasted four days, until it came before the House of Commons. The European Research Group, the anti-E.U. faction among the Conservatives, added amendments that would nullify May’s proposal to keep Britain permanently under the E.U.’s legal suzerainty and partially inside its customs borders for goods. The remains of May’s dignity went the next day, when pro-E.U. Conservatives counterattacked with amendments designed to effectively keep Britain in the E.U. forever, a gambit that May defeated with the support of pro-Brexit Labour rebels. Next, Boris Johnson, who is usually given more to wit than intelligence, delivered a resignation speech so polite and reasonable that it can only have been a pitch for May’s job.
To survive this double onslaught from her own party, May had to accept amendments that she opposed and oppose amendments that she wanted. This is the equivalent of negotiating the passage between Scylla and Charybdis by aiming for the rocks and then bouncing into the whirlpool. The vessel may still be floating, but the sailors know that the captain is a fool and that their fate is tied to hers. In case anyone still doubted that May was out of her depth, Michel Barnier, the E.U.’s chief negotiator, delivered a gratuitous insult by preemptively rejecting May’s proposals.
The consensus in Westminster is that May is a person of good character, a vicar’s daughter, trying to do the right thing. She is not Edward Heath, the Conservative prime minister who in 1975 persuaded Britons to vote to enter Europe’s customs union while denying that this would commit Britain to the political union that the leaders of the European Economic Community were already planning and that Heath wanted. Heath was a clever liar. May is becoming a foolish and dishonest one. For her, commitment to duty seems increasingly indistinguishable from clinging to power and its perks.
May was a Remainer in 2016. Her Chequers plan was for Brexit in name only. She claims that it fulfills the terms for Brexit, but this is not true. The pre-referendum booklets sent to every household by David Cameron’s government specified that Brexit would mean leaving the E.U.’s single market and customs union. May had endorsed this “clean Brexit” in 2016 and 2017. Now she is attempting to foist the worst of all Brexits on the public. Under the Chequers plan, Britain would pay nearly 40 billion pounds in dues to the E.U. and remain inside the customs union, but it would lose its voice in the councils of the E.U. and not recover its parliamentary sovereignty.
May has shown enough wit to retain her office but not the intelligence that Britain needs at its most critical juncture since 1945. The public voted for a revision of Britain’s economic and legal relationships with the world. Instead of trying to reconcile parliamentary sovereignty with the global economy, May suggests that Britain become a vassal state of a corrupt and failing empire. Shamelessly, her team tried to bring Parliament’s summer recess forward by five days, in order to preserve her government until September. They abandoned the plan when it became clear that they didn’t have the votes.
The word in Westminster is that May’s enemies will call a vote of no confidence in September, when Parliament resumes, or in October, when Barnier formally rejects the Chequers proposal and, as he has at every stage, demands further concessions. This may seem like an intelligent strategy if you are Boris Johnson or a Conservative backbencher. But the longer this goes on, the worse it will be. Not just for May, who is a dead woman walking, or even for the Conservatives, who seem set on proving their unfitness for office, but for the country.
The Conservative party membership is in open revolt. Labour, despite being led by Jeremy Corbyn, a revolutionary socialist stained by friendship with Islamists and anti-Semites, is edging ahead in the polls. A majority of Conservatives in parliament, exposed by the 2016 referendum as out of touch with the public, are still out of touch. They distrust Boris Johnson more than they fear Corbyn, even though Johnson is the only Conservative with the wit to capture the swing voters.
Nor have a majority of parliamentary Conservatives accepted what the public has already grasped and what the Euroskeptics always said. The E.U. never had any intention of accommodating Britain with a bespoke deal. With Euroskepticism rising across the member states, it is both congenial and necessary for the E.U. to humiliate Britain pour encourager les autres. The character of the E.U. is fundamentally undemocratic, its policies are lacking in intelligence, and its leaders are witless. Everyone in Britain knows this, even those who prefer to be in the E.U. rather than out of it. Still, the BBC and the Remainers in the Conservative party insist that they know better than the voters.
Britain now faces only two possibilities, to collapse backwards into the E.U. or crash forward into a “hard Brexit.” The first would turn the current failure into a crisis of democracy, because it would betray the referendum result. The second would be a hard economic landing. But at least Britain would keep the 40 billion pounds and be free to negotiate trade deals with the rest of the world. It would also be a functioning democracy, because its elected leaders would have honored their promises.
Last week, the newspapers speculated that a hard Brexit would mean chaos at the borders. Stocks of medicine would run out. Trucks would jam the motorway all the way from London to the port at Dover. The army would have to step in to keep the peace. None of this should even be conceivable: May’s government promised to prepare for every contingency.
It is an index of how disgracefully May has acted in betraying her word, and how disgracefully her MPs have behaved in putting party before country, that this kind of fiasco remains conceivable. Worse, it is all too easy to imagine May still in charge as the ship goes down. Either the Conservatives do the right thing with a modicum of wit and intelligence, or this collective failure of character will sink them for a generation.
