This Brexit
mess cannot go on. Theresa May must stand down now
Matthew
d'Ancona
She is said to be the
only senior Tory who could preside over the talks. The trouble is, she’s making
Britain an international joke
Sun 4 Feb
2018 15.36 GMT Last modified on Sun 4 Feb 2018 22.00 GMT
“Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud
hatch out”: the muttered incantation of the emperor in Robert Graves’s Claudius
the God has rarely seemed so apposite. It is time for this government to drop
the pretence that it is healthy and functioning. A reckoning is long past due.
Daily, we see a new pustule or sore – on some days several. According to the
Sunday Times, the Brexiteers are plotting to install Boris Johnson as prime
minister, Michael Gove as his deputy and Jacob Rees-Mogg as chancellor. The
last of those would be especially contentious, since the Moggster has spent
much of the past week accusing the Treasury of “fiddling the figures” in its
analysis of Britain’s prospective departure from the EU.
Yet – as if
to pave the way for an ideological purge of Her Majesty’s Treasury – the
leading Brexiteer MP Bernard Jenkin accuses Philip Hammond in the Sunday
Telegraph of trying to countermand the prime minister’s argument that we should
leave the EU customs union. For those Tories who (mysteriously) regard Brexit
as the path to a New Jerusalem, the chancellor’s call in Davos for only “very
modest” changes to the UK’s relationship with the EU is simply a provocation
too far.
It has
become a grotesque pantomime. Tory remainers demand Johnson’s head every time
he intervenes – as he did last month, briefing the press that the NHS should be
given £100m extra a week as a downpayment on what the foreign secretary still
insists will be a grand Brexit bonanza. Whenever Hammond seeks to salvage this
or that element of Britain’s economic relationship with Europe, he is accused
by leavers of disregarding the “will of the people”.
Few Tories
now dispute the length and gravity of the charge sheet against Theresa May: a
disastrous general election, a terrible party conference and a reshuffle that
merely advertised her weakness. The argument that her resilience is somehow
noble is made much less frequently: in the midst of such political mayhem, it
looks increasingly like stubborn political delusion.
‘She is the
stuffed remnant of a once-optimistic prime minister. This is government by
taxidermy.’ Photograph: Vianney Le Caer/Rex/Shutterstock
Still,
though, one continues to hear that she should stay where she is, as the only
senior Tory who can realistically preside over the “constructive ambiguity”
required by the Brexit talks – publicly demanding a clean break while quietly
negotiating the complex, nuanced and unheroic deal that anyone remotely
sensible knows is the only halfway palatable outcome.
The trouble
is, she is doing no such thing. She is not the deft manager of meaning,
soothing all sides and persuading each faction that its interests are being
respected. She is the stuffed remnant of a once-optimistic prime minister,
helpless in the midst of anarchic cacophony. This is government by taxidermy.
It is no
longer plausible to argue that a formal test of her leadership would be a fatal
disruption of the talks with Brussels. Without a decisive answer to the
question “Who leads, and where?” I do not see how those talks can meaningfully
proceed. We are an international joke, at risk of being taken to the cleaners
by the EU or left with no deal at all. In such circumstances, clarification is
not a distraction but precisely the opposite.
Were I in May’s shoes, I would pre-empt a
confidence vote and – in the manner of John Major in 1995 – demand one myself
Were I in
May’s shoes, I would pre-empt a confidence vote forced by letters from 48 of my
own MPs, and – in the manner of John Major in 1995 – demand one myself (if
necessary by instructing sympathetic backbenchers to trigger the process). I
would then set out an explicit, unambiguous and unapologetic strategy for
Brexit, and instruct the Conservative parliamentary party to back me or sack
me.
Let us say,
as seems quite probable, that MPs sacked her, as they did Iain Duncan Smith in
2003. There would then be a period of bedlam as the Tory party fought with
teeth bared and daggers drawn to settle not only its future but the future of
Britain’s relationship with the EU. It would be ugly, protracted and almost
entirely destructive.
Would the
answer that emerged at the end be sustainable? Would the new Conservative
leader – and, if the Commons pact with the Democratic Unionist party held –
prime minister be able to provide the discipline and clear sense of trajectory
that has been so conspicuously lacking under May? Quite possibly not. But that
is the whole point. It may well be that the Tory party, as presently
constituted, is structurally incapable of meeting the patriotic needs of the
hour. It really is for the Conservatives, and not the rest of us, to prove that
this suspicion is unfounded.
At any
rate, the present arrangement is a hideous international embarrassment. It
seems to me painfully obvious that we need an extension of the negotiating
period set by article 50 – entirely possible under its section 3 – if only to
replace panic with some semblance of deliberation. And, sooner rather than
later, there should be another general election.
I am
scarcely Jeremy Corbyn’s greatest fan, but the notion that the status quo must
be preserved simply to thwart his chances of becoming prime minister is not
only democratically contemptible but morally outrageous. Indeed, the prospect
of a fresh election would force Labour, at last, to spell out its plans for
Brexit, and embrace the risks of clarity.
Yes, I know
the voters are fed up of trudging to the polling booths. But they’ll be even
more fed up if Britain sleepwalks into a second-rate status, with all that
implies, because a clinically dead government was permitted by a mixture of
squeamishness and boredom to remain on life support. Time to flick the
switch and see what happens.
• Matthew
d’Ancona is a Guardian columnist
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