A dignified end to a disastrous and disgraceful premiership

With her voice cracking, Theresa May said it had been an honour to serve the country she loves. Her resignation speech today was the cue for the rotters (raises hand slowly) to feel guilty about writing for almost two years that she must go. Give her some credit, surely. She stuck at it and she did her best. Who could have done better? (Picks up phone book and chooses a name at random.)

I’m a sucker for a Prime Ministerial resignation. I’m such an old softie that I even felt a pang of sympathy watching the departure of Gordon Brown – the power-mad architect of poor banking regulation and the proponent of the deranged concept of the end of boom and bust that then went bang with such horrible results for the nation.

I felt that wave of sympathy again today seeing May admit that her time is up. Many people will have felt it. What a horrible, but endlessly surprising and human, business politics is.

Beyond basic human sympathy for the trauma suffered by someone clearly fragile, and ill-suited to the post she sought for so long, I’m afraid that a few minutes later what was left on my part was a feeling of anger. That is anger with the Conservative party for letting May stay as Prime Minister well past the point when it was obvious that she lacked the elementary curiosity, imagination and people skills to make a success of it.

Hers has been a disastrous and disgraceful premiership.

In phase one, May allowed the country to be run by her closest advisers in a way that trampled cabinet government and violated norms of behaviour. Lacking confidence, May put faith in a ruthless operation that ruled by fear. This is not the sole fault of the two advisors, although they must have sensed that she was unsuitable. They sought to steer and shape her. She went along with it, for power.

May is a grown up. She was the leader, the person with responsibility, who let all this happen around her. Fatally, the dysfunction fed into the calamitous conduct of the general election campaign which brutally exposed May’s failings of judgment and the limitations of her approach.

Until then the widespread and mistaken assumption about May had been that behind the enigmatic mask lurked a great strategic intelligence, a whirring political brain like a Merkel or a trainee Margaret Thatcher.

No, the realisation dawned quite suddenly on the country, there was close to nothing there.

That period in the campaign around the social care and stealing older people’s houses policy fiasco was like nothing most of us who report on these things have seen. It was like the flicking of a switch. Lynton Crosby, the hired gun working on the campaign, had initially been flabbergasted by how positive voters were about the serious, stable May. Overnight, the voter view changed to contempt as May emitted nothing more than robotic and vapid sundries.

Support for May, it turned out, had been broad with no depth. When she hit trouble and was exposed, support collapsed.

In the aftermath of the election farce, when she lost the hard won majority from 2015, the cabinet should have forced her out to reset Brexit, either as a cross party compromise or by preparing properly to no deal. Or even both, with no deal the default.

One of the weirdest developments in modern British political history ensued in the days after the election humiliation. Brexit Secretary David Davis (this is two Brexit Secretaries ago, 23 months past) persuaded May to stay, believing that Boris as a replacement would be a disaster.

Yet, simultaneously, May had stitched up her saviour Davis via her officials. Rather than a row about the sequencing that Davis wanted, May signed off on instant surrender on the order of the talks. This set things up for the one-sided negotiation in which the Brits would have to settle the money first and get snared up in the Irish question, and never get properly  to the future relationship.

After that, the EU continued winning and the weak cabinet were serially misled.

Indeed, one of the blackest marks against May’s premiership will be her favouring her friends or acolytes – Bradley and Brokenshire spring to mind – who should not have been anywhere near cabinet level. The reliance for a while on the unsuitable Gavin Williamson, and his smelly elevation to Defence Secretary after Sir Michael Fallon was manoeuvred out, was strange. Too late, May rumbled the tarantula-owning former fireplace salesman, and had him fired after senior civil servants and security and intelligence chiefs made their feelings known about his activities.

And then, month after month, there was her abject failure to sell her blasted deal even once her officials had secured it. She didn’t level with the country, or even seek properly to persuade. Eventually, in a corner, she mounted a disgraceful attack on parliament and then folded on no deal anyway when for a few weeks her friends thought she might actually get on and get the UK out on March 29th even if her deal could not pass.

May and her weak cabinet then committed an epic error of historic proportions, letting the European elections go ahead, leading to the establishment of a populist party which might break the mainstream system. “Letting the Brexit party get established was a fatal cock-up and it may cost us a third of our vote permanently,” a minister furious with May told me last night.

The Tory party’s most senior figures let all this happen. May failed, but they failed too in enabling and allowing it. Everyone in this country who wants to avoid the horrors of a far left government must hope that the Tories get their act together and under fresh leadership can clean up the mess before it is too late.