Theresa May is the master of disaster and the mistress of distress. These are not compliments but indices of the sustained malfunctioning of the British political system and of a Conservative party unable to resolve its deep ambivalence towards the European Union. No British prime minister has survived through such adversity—and to so little positive effect.
For a few sweet hours this week, hopes were raised that the long agony of May’s premiership was about to end. The knife went in some time on the evening of December 11. While May was returning from the continent after another fruitless and humiliating attempt to revive her Brexit deal, one of her MPs delivered a letter of no confidence to Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee, which regulates the disordered inner life of the parliamentary Conservatives. Sir Graham, realizing that the tally of letters had passed the 48 required to trigger a leadership contest, informed May.
Stabbed in the back, May prepared to be stabbed in the front in the vote the next day. With the misplaced sense of duty and the pedestrian adherence to procedure that have defined her sorry tenure, she proclaimed her determination to fight it out. The analogies to Julius Caesar are purely procedural, for May is a leader who fails to lead, a contriver of base compromises and gratuitous defeats, and the deliverer of the Brexit deal that is not.
When the votes in the no-confidence motion were counted on the evening of December 12, it emerged that, in defiance of reason and the national interest, May had won by 200 votes to 117. Her survival continues a personal winning streak that is a losing streak for her party and country. This was a typical May victory—demoralizing even for the winners.
In 1990, Margaret Thatcher won 204 votes in the first round of the Conservative leadership ballot. She accepted that she had lost her party’s trust and resigned. In 1995, John Major gambled that winning 218 votes in the first round of a leadership ballot was good enough. He managed to retain control of the party and the premiership, but his victory won him just two more years in power, whereupon Tony Blair led a revived Labour party to a landslide victory in the 1997 general elections. It is Major, the gray mediocrity bound for failure, that May now seeks to emulate.
In order to secure the votes against the no-confidence motion, May promised that she would not lead the party into the next general elections, scheduled for 2022. This amounts to an acceptance, proven by her squandering of an inherited majority in the 2017 general elections, that she is an unworthy leader of the Conservatives. Which indeed is the case. She was pushed into Downing Street after the 2016 Brexit referendum not as the best leader for the country at a crucial juncture but as a compromise candidate for the Conservatives, an unsafe pair of hands who could be trusted to bungle the task. No one expected her to be this good at doing a bad job.
May has portrayed herself as a “bloody difficult woman,” a slogger in the national interest. Yet her entire premiership has been a catalogue of disasters from its initial misstep—her choice to negotiate with a hostile E.U. instead of making preliminary arrangements for a “No Deal” alternative, including free-trade arrangements with friendly countries like the United States and India—to the misfired general election that was intended to secure her a mandate but instead annulled it, and finally to her sustained and quasi-delusional insistence that the most the E.U. was willing to offer would be acceptable to the Commons and the public.
In the first week of December, May attempted to sell her Brexit deal to the House of Commons. She lost three votes in a single sitting. One of these votes found her government to be in contempt of the House of Commons, apparently for attempting to hide the attorney-general’s damaging legal advice about the Brexit deal. May and her ministers had claimed that the deal would not place Britain in an open-ended limbo, from which it could only escape with the E.U.’s permission. The government’s own legal advisers, however, had told May otherwise.
The same went for May’s insistence that the Northern Irish “backstop,” a device for avoiding a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, was a temporary measure. It turned out that the backstop could be permanent, if Britain and the E.U. proved unable to agree on an alternative.
A stronger prime minister, caught in a lie and humbled three times as members of her own party rejected the only legislative attainment of her premiership, might have reflected overnight and then resigned. A braver prime minister would have resigned that very day. But May pressed on, with the bravery of the coward who prefers a thousand humiliations. These duly arrived.
On Monday morning, December 10, ministers were still telling BBC Radio that nothing would stop the vote on the deal scheduled for the following day, even though some 100 Conservative MPs had already announced their intention of voting against it and members of May’s cabinet were reported to be begging her to delay it. She accepted their advice and canceled the vote, sparking a furious Commons session. At one moment, a Labour MP even picked up the giant ceremonial mace, the symbol of the queen’s authority, and walked up and down the Chamber in an impotent impersonation of Oliver Cromwell.
May, deploying her peerless talent for delusion, kept insisting that the Brexit deal could be saved even though E.U. and European leaders insist it is not up for renegotiation. As though galvanized by her humiliation in the Commons into creating a new indignity, May shuttled off to beg for concessions from Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte and Germany’s Angela Merkel. When May’s car pulled up in Berlin for her meeting with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel was left waiting on a small piece of red carpet as May appeared unable to open her door and security men pulled at the handle in an increasingly farcical attempt to free her. Eventually, May staggered out, as she always does from whatever wreckage she has contrived to trap herself in, and gave a game shrug and a smile to Merkel, who returned the same gestures, if only from pity. There was no pity, however, in Merkel’s statement after their meeting that the Brexit deal could not be reopened.
The British media often refer to May’s harrowing humiliations as “setbacks.” They are, in the sense that the Titanic striking an iceberg was a setback for the White Star Line’s scheduled service. They are, in the sense that May’s continued presence in 10 Downing Street, her leadership of the Conservative party, and her betrayal of the 2016 Brexit referendum result and her 2017 general election promises are setbacks for democracy.
May clings to office while her power leaches away, and the majority of Con-servative MPs cling to her—more terrified of a pro-Brexit Tory taking over as leader today than of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour winning a general election tomorrow. But nothing can put off the reckoning forever, and the longer the Conservatives defer it, the harsher it is likely to be. There are three possibilities ahead for Britain, and none of them reflect well on the Conservatives. One is to abandon Brexit and the majority of voters who approved leaving the E.U. in the June 2016 referendum. Another is to shoot the rapids and leave the E.U. in March 2019 with no deal at all, an outcome that the Washington Post, exaggerating only a little, called a “humanitarian and economic crisis.”
The third option is to rally around May and a slightly modified deal and attempt to force it through the Commons. Her victory on the no-confidence vote does not portend success. Tory members of the pro-Brexit European Research Group may ally with the opposition parties and vote against the government. It is likely that the Democratic Unionist Party, without whose support May’s minority government cannot function, will reject any deal that contains a Northern Ireland backstop. And thus May may well endure further humiliations.
All political careers end in failure, but few premierships begin in it and sustain it throughout their term. As prime ministers go, May has already secured a place in the hall of shame right next to those appeasers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, and the all-time champion bungler of foreign affairs, Lord North. The raising of the mace in the House this week shows that it is past time for May to take Cromwell’s advice—advice repeated by Leo Amery to Neville Chamberlain as he clung to office but not to power, in 1940: “In the name of God, go!”
