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| May’s latest screeching U-turn makes her utterly unfit to lead | May’s latest screeching U-turn makes her utterly unfit to lead |
| (about 1 hour later) | |
| No matter how bad you think Theresa May is, she always manages to get worse. Her record of insisting on one thing, only to U-turn weeks, days or even hours later is almost impressive in its scope. There would be no snap election, she vowed – and then there was one. Her Brexit deal would be subject to a meaningful vote in December – and then the vote was pulled, punted into the new year. Brexit would happen on 29 March – and now it won’t. | No matter how bad you think Theresa May is, she always manages to get worse. Her record of insisting on one thing, only to U-turn weeks, days or even hours later is almost impressive in its scope. There would be no snap election, she vowed – and then there was one. Her Brexit deal would be subject to a meaningful vote in December – and then the vote was pulled, punted into the new year. Brexit would happen on 29 March – and now it won’t. |
| This latest example is the Russian doll of reversals, with several other reversals contained within it. For just last week, May’s de facto deputy, David Lidington, was adamant that any delay to Brexit would have to be lengthy, since a short, one-off extension would be both pointless – leaving too little time to do anything – and “downright reckless”, as well as being “completely at odds with the position” MPs had taken the previous evening. May had told the Commons that, if MPs voted down her agreement with the EU – which they did – she would be seeking a long extension. She delivered the same message to the cabinet only yesterday. | This latest example is the Russian doll of reversals, with several other reversals contained within it. For just last week, May’s de facto deputy, David Lidington, was adamant that any delay to Brexit would have to be lengthy, since a short, one-off extension would be both pointless – leaving too little time to do anything – and “downright reckless”, as well as being “completely at odds with the position” MPs had taken the previous evening. May had told the Commons that, if MPs voted down her agreement with the EU – which they did – she would be seeking a long extension. She delivered the same message to the cabinet only yesterday. |
| Brexit: EU to allow article 50 extension only if MPs vote for a deal, says Tusk – Politics live | Brexit: EU to allow article 50 extension only if MPs vote for a deal, says Tusk – Politics live |
| Yet now we have her letter to Donald Tusk and, guess what, she’s asking for only a short delay till 30 June, leaving heavy hints that she would rather resign than postpone our EU exit beyond that date. These screeching, rubber-burning U-turns of May’s can make you queasy. What she had once depicted as an inevitable course of action has, within 24 hours, become so unpalatable to May that she’ll walk if you make her do it. | Yet now we have her letter to Donald Tusk and, guess what, she’s asking for only a short delay till 30 June, leaving heavy hints that she would rather resign than postpone our EU exit beyond that date. These screeching, rubber-burning U-turns of May’s can make you queasy. What she had once depicted as an inevitable course of action has, within 24 hours, become so unpalatable to May that she’ll walk if you make her do it. |
| All of which confirms what a broken reed of a prime minister she is, useless in every regard. She cannot impose her will on her own cabinet, but is instead a prisoner of it, especially the Brexiter faction which refused to countenance a long extension. The former Tory MP Anna Soubry surely got to the heart of the matter when she asked on the Today programme, “Who is running Britain? The answer is the ERG, a party within a party.” | All of which confirms what a broken reed of a prime minister she is, useless in every regard. She cannot impose her will on her own cabinet, but is instead a prisoner of it, especially the Brexiter faction which refused to countenance a long extension. The former Tory MP Anna Soubry surely got to the heart of the matter when she asked on the Today programme, “Who is running Britain? The answer is the ERG, a party within a party.” |
| So much for the origins of this decision. What of its impact? Sadly, the clearest reading was also offered by Lidington in those same remarks to the Commons. A short extension, he said, would make “a no-deal scenario far more rather than less likely.” He’s right and this represents the oddest of May’s reverses, upending not only her publicly stated position but also her own strategy for getting her deal across the line. | So much for the origins of this decision. What of its impact? Sadly, the clearest reading was also offered by Lidington in those same remarks to the Commons. A short extension, he said, would make “a no-deal scenario far more rather than less likely.” He’s right and this represents the oddest of May’s reverses, upending not only her publicly stated position but also her own strategy for getting her deal across the line. |
| For what was May’s gameplan? It was to present hardcore Brexiters with an awful choice: either back her plan or watch Brexit get swallowed up in the long grass from which it might never emerge. That was her tactic, admitted last month by Olly Robbins, her chief Brexit negotiator, overheard in a Brussels bar. | For what was May’s gameplan? It was to present hardcore Brexiters with an awful choice: either back her plan or watch Brexit get swallowed up in the long grass from which it might never emerge. That was her tactic, admitted last month by Olly Robbins, her chief Brexit negotiator, overheard in a Brussels bar. |
| Now that plan has been upended, not least by tonight’s response from Donald Tusk agreeing to a short extension only if MPs pass May’s deal. If they don’t, Britain will still be heading towards a no-deal crash-out from the EU in just over a week’s time. Yet that, of course, holds no terror to the Brexit ultras: given the choice between May’s deal and the no-deal exit that they sense is just within reach, they will choose the latter. So much for her grand strategy. (If the withdrawal agreement goes down to a third defeat, the best she could hope for is that Tusk offers a long extension - though that would surely, given what she said today, trigger her resignation.) | |
| This is just one aspect of the collective nervous breakdown that is Brexit (Almost) everyone knows that to leave without a deal will be a disaster. Everyone also knows the Commons has it in its power to avert that disaster. And yet today we have taken another step towards it, led by a prime minister utterly unable to lead. | |
| • Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist | • Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist |
| MPs must face it: there is no alternative to Theresa May’s deal | Vernon Bogdanor | MPs must face it: there is no alternative to Theresa May’s deal | Vernon Bogdanor |
| Brexit | Brexit |
| Opinion | Opinion |
| Article 50 | Article 50 |
| European Union | European Union |
| Foreign policy | Foreign policy |
| Theresa May | Theresa May |
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