If the Tories don’t remove May now they face electoral oblivion

There is nothing more dangerous and self-defeating in politics, as in every other area of life, than the inability to discern the true significance of events, viewing them instead through a prism of self-interest, groupthink and partisanship. That is the problem currently blinding all those in the Westminster bubble.

Take, as an example, the elusive 48 letters required to challenge Theresa May’s leadership of the Conservative Party. In the groupthink of politicians and commentators the failure of the ERG to amass the minimum number of letters is cause for mockery, to claim that the ERG members have made themselves a laughing stock and to regard this stalemate as a victory for Theresa May. All of that is true, so far as it goes, but it is only a minor aspect of the situation: it is the view inside the bubble, not the view of the country.

In the real world outside Westminster this crisis is viewed differently. A prime minister who appears to have taken leave of her senses is on the verge of signing within days a treaty that would ruin Britain, destroy its sovereignty, its trade, its prosperity.

It was the Conservative Party that created this Remainer government to implement Brexit, so the nation looks to that party to save it from an unhinged leadership. And what does it see? It sees that, out of 315 Conservative MPs, not even 48 are willing to save Britain from disaster. What message does that send to the country? That cowardice, personal ambition and entitlement take precedence over the continued existence of Britain as a sovereign nation.

Tory MPs might as well parade Parliament Square wearing sandwich boards bearing the message: ‘Please do not vote Conservative – ever again’. Every patronizing quip from Nicholas Soames, the epitome of entitlement, and his Remainer confreres reinforces that message. This is the 2018 equivalent of the arrogant mantra routinely intoned by Tory grandees whenever they sold their supporters down the river: ‘They have nowhere else to go.’

But they must have had somewhere else to go, otherwise the Conservative Party would not have failed to achieve an overall majority from 1997 to 2015 and then lost it again – due to the acute political nous of Theresa May – in 2017. Those wilderness years originated in the 1992 ERM debacle – again, an EU-related crisis – which the Tories thought the voters would soon forgive and forget. In fact they did neither, as the Tories discovered in 1997.

Since 1992 the Conservative Party has lost its reputation for economic competence. Now it is abdicating its remaining asset, its reputation for patriotism. Yet there are not 48 Conservative MPs willing to derail that betrayal. Worse still is the sincere reason why some well-intentioned MPs are holding back: their informed calculation that there are not 158 colleagues willing to vote down this catastrophe. That being so, why would any Briton ever want to vote Conservative?

Of course the politicians in the other parties are equally contemptible: when the liquidation of British sovereignty is put to a parliamentary vote, the last consideration on any side of the green benches will be the good of the country. Theresa May’s squalid recitation of her mantra ‘the national interest’ has made that phrase toxic and meaningless.

The Corbyn bogey will not save the Tories. Electors have only a vague impression of oppositions – especially one as incoherent as Labour – but they experience governments. If May’s plan goes through, 2022 will be an extinction event for the Conservative Party. Even the thinking out loud in which Conservative MPs are currently indulging betrays their complete lack of any sense of proportion or reality.

The chatter is all about not letting Theresa May lead them into the next general election. If she has liquidated the United Kingdom before Christmas, such considerations will be meaningless. What Tory MPs should be concerned about is overthrowing Theresa May before she can damage the country irretrievably.

As with all catastrophes, there are some humorous aspects. The antics of Michael Gove and his four colleagues furnish some entertainment. So, in the media world, at a time when even the most successful newspapers face a precarious future, does the spectacle of the Daily May alienating its readership in a spectacular act of self-harm – a re-enactment of the manner in which the Conservative modernizers (prominent among them Theresa May) set out successfully to disembarrass their party of its supporters.

However, in the context of the bigger picture, there is a further phenomenon the country is now seeing clearly for the first time: the malignant influence of the deep state. When real conservatives here and in America first denounced the Deep State, commentators derided their claims as conspiracy theory. So, who has had a more potent influence on this disastrous Brexit In Name Only toxic package than Oliver Robbins? Is he a figment of the imagination? Tony Blair’s fulsome congratulation of him for camouflaging the reality of the withdrawal deal says it all.

When a civil servant other than the Cabinet Secretary loses anonymity there is something wrong. The sidelining of successive Brexit Secretaries in favour of Robbins and his team, reinforced by the activities of Treasury mandarins, heralded the victory of the establishment over democracy. Civil servants have long frustrated the policy implications of general election victories. For them to nullify a massive, single-issue referendum result signals the death of democracy in Britain.

Untruth is the key to establishment power. We have been brought to the current crisis by two Big Lies: that a Brexit on WTO terms would be a ‘cliff edge’, when it is the normal foundation of much of the world’s trade, and that some ill-defined imperative decreed there must not be a conventional international border, such as exists all across the globe, on the 310-mile long Northern Ireland frontier with the European Union.

On those two fantasies Britain’s enemies, external and internal, based their plot to impose Brexit In Name Only. Whether they ultimately succeed or not lies in the hands of the British public. Either way, do not look to the likelihood of the Conservative Party being around in the 2020s.