Wanting a historical legacy explains May being resigned to no deal

In the end, it usually comes down to the question of legacy. Prime Ministers are almost always fixated on the verdict of history and how they will be remembered decades after we all are gone and their portrait is still on the wall of the staircase in Downing Street.

No Prime Minister wants to go down history as a blip, as an in-betweener drummed from office. Matthew Parris in The Times earlier this year wrote that just by getting to this year in one piece, and still being in office, Theresa May will be recorded for posterity as Prime Minister 2016-2019. It was a good observation. That last number being a nine rather than an eight shouldn’t make a difference to anything, really, but somehow it does. Three years looks serious. Two years would have looked like a mistake.

Similarly, at the time there was much speculation on why Jim Callaghan (one of the great patriots of the proper Labour movement) did not take his chance in the Autumn of 1978. He might have won that year and Margaret Thatcher would not have made it to Number 10. Yet he delayed for eight months, seemingly hoping for a better guarantee of his chances, or for economic improvements, and lost. Still, waiting meant he left as Jim Callaghan, PM, 1976-1979, rather than 1976-1978. To a Prime Minister, it looks better.

There is more to it than dates alone, of course. Historians ask whether a Prime Minister stayed at their post and did – however it is defined – their duty by the country. Were their critics wrong? Did they outfox their internal and external enemies? Did they say anything amusing? Was their biggest call on foreign policy correct?

I’m a long-term May-sceptic and have been writing for almost 18 months that she should be replaced. I didn’t like the country being run from the bar of the Corinthia hotel by her two chiefs of staff in 2016 and early 2107. Briefly, I thought I had underestimated May when she called the early general election. Then came the car crash of an election campaign and everything since.

But she has guts and persistence, and the most extraordinary capacity for soaking up pressure and ignoring her critics.

Which brings me to May being resigned to no deal. I’ve now heard that said in recent days by several well-placed sources who have observed the shift, and been right in the past in my experience. May wants her deal to pass, of course, while accepting that it almost certainly won’t. No deal it is, rather than two more years of faffing about via an extension. Someone needs to see it through. She’s the Prime Minister. Parliament can’t make up its mind. No deal it is, with regret. Here we go. Stop blubbing. Pull yourselves together.

There are many wild rumours flying about – of resignation, of collapse, of a David Lidington emergency premiership – but I suspect that Laura  Kuenssberg’s amusing observation is correct and May intends to go nowhere in the next few weeks. Laura reported someone saying that May will super-glue herself to her desk and refuse to leave until Britain has left the EU.

Why would May do that?

Please put aside, for one moment, whether you want to leave the EU or stay in it, or think no deal the end of the world or merely a load of Chicken Licken “sky will fall” hysteria. Consider it, instead, from May’s point of view in terms of her legacy and the verdict of history once all the shouting has stopped.

She has two options and a stark choice (from her perspective, not your perspective, not my perspective.)

With no deal, May can still be the Prime Minister who took the UK out of the EU, having tried to get a deal and accepted the logic of the failure of the deal, that is to leave without a deal. There may be a degree of bedlam afterwards, but worse has happened in living memory. And there it is: Prime Minister from 2016-2019, with a big, bold promise of history-making proportions delivered. In the pub quiz of 2089, if pubs are still legal, when they ask who was the PM who took Britain out of the EU the answer is clear in the case of no deal. Theresa May.

Or she can fold in the next few weeks. She can surrender to the high priest of the soft Brexiteers Oliver Letwin – Oliver Letwin! – and accept a vague two year extension, making her the PM hounded from office in a few months (what was the point of any of it?) who did not achieve the delivery of the key pledge of her premiership, that was to leave the European Union as instructed by the voters.

We’re about to find out soon which May chooses. Past form, personality, and the need to satisfy the verdict of history (on May’s terms, not yours or mine) point towards the former, I suspect.

If the derided May is resolved on a course of action, her opponents in the Commons are all over the place ahead of so-called indicative votes. For all the talk of parliament taking over, and of alternative, magical plans being endorsed in the next few weeks, it is not even clear a “soft Brexit” has the votes in the Commons. Its advocates do not agree what soft Brexit looks like anyway. Some want a referendum attached, for which there is no majority in the Commons. Others want a customs union of varying descriptions. Perhaps in an emergency the Commons could vote to order May to revoke Article 50 entirely, although MPs seem scared of doing so, and it is not clear they can force her to comply. Parliament cannot be the executive, it must change the executive. The Tory party doesn’t seem minded to do that at the moment. The bulk of the cabinet is clinging to May, now it seems even the ERG (wanting no deal) doesn’t want her removed, hilariously, when a few months ago they tried to fire her.

In this way, by a series of accidents, and with a stubborn person glued to the desk, no deal is the default.

Indeed, at the European Council, the Prime Minister seemed to predicate her presentation on the basis of no deal being the likely outcome. If her deal falls, then it is no deal, and her deal doesn’t look like it will pass. So…

In among the standard Brussels dismissal of May (sure, she cannot communicate, unlike the President of France who never shuts up) the reporting suggested some of the more perceptive officials and leaders had picked up on her being resigned to what – without a dramatic change – is coming. May is the realist about the options here.