Theresa May was hired to do one job and she couldn’t do it, and she managed to screw up a lot of other things along the way. Now that she’s stepping down, the political obituaries are rolling in and they’re not kind.
Madeleine Kearns’ “Theresa May: A Political Obituary”:
Theresa May became the second female prime minister after the Brexit referendum result and David Cameron’s resignation in July 2016. In March 2017, she decided to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, setting the Brexit process into motion and giving the United Kingdom exactly two years to exit the bloc.
In 2017, May then called a snap election, which threw away her party’s majority and propelled Jeremy Corbyn within striking distance of power. Needing support in facing this threat, May was forced into a coalition with the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party.
Given the needless and catastrophic damage inflicted by the general election, this was the obvious moment for her to resign. But she didn’t. After insincerely promising a commitment to Brexit (“no deal is better than a bad deal”), May then came up with an unbelievably bad deal: the withdrawal agreement, which was crushed by historic margins in parliament. Again, here she should have resigned. But again, she didn’t. Her deal was then rejected two further times and each time May clung on, only narrowly surviving a vote of no-confidence in December of last year.
So, what to make of this? In her resignation speech May extolled the virtues of compromise. But her mishandling of the Brexit negotiations was never about strategic diplomacy in pursuit of Britain’s best interests, it was about political incompetence in a damage-control exercise gone badly wrong.
By signaling to the European Union that she would not entertain no deal, May allowed the Brussels and the two-thirds Remain majority in Westminster to use secondary issues as bully tactics. After 2017, May began to make concessions that were unthinkable to most Leave voters. The Irish backstop, the regulatory annexation of Northern Ireland, and finally — with her fourth attempt at a deal this month — cross-party talks with the Labour party, which entertained the idea of a second referendum (the precise opposite of Brexit).
Politico: “Inside Theresa May’s Great British Failure”:
It was May 16, 2019 — and no-one in the room could see a way forward. Their only option was to make one last offer to MPs: a chance to vote for a second referendum.
“Are you telling me it’s not going to work?” May asked the assembled aides sitting around her table or on sofas nearby, according one senior official familiar with the discussion that day. Her aides did not sugarcoat it: None thought it would work.
It was the moment May and her team had tried for so long to avoid — the end of the road. From that point it was only a matter of time. But the prime minister was determined to roll the dice anyway.
The scene reveals a prime minister whose commitment, duty and determination crashed up against an almost unprecedented evaporation of authority, power and influence after a series of catastrophic miscalculations. None was more damaging than her decision to call a snap general election in 2017, robbing her of the majority she needed to take Britain out of the EU with a deal acceptable to her Conservative Party.
Snip.
Theresa May had inherited the biggest political challenge for any U.K. prime minister since 1945 — and proved unequal to the task. Personal and political shortcomings met the inescapable reality of parliamentary arithmetic, EU power and the Irish border.
Instead of delivering Brexit and making the country work for provincial Britain, as she promised, she departs leaving an even bigger crisis than the one she inherited, with little — if anything — by way of domestic achievements to show by way of mitigation.
Iain Murray: “Theresa May’s Calamitous Premiership Comes to an End”:
Much of the commentary surrounding her departure will focus on her inept handling of the Brexit negotiations, or her misjudgment in squandering the safe majority bequeathed to her by David Cameron, but I’d like to draw attention to an equally calamitous mistake: her disdain for free-market economics.
At a very early point in her leadership, Mrs. May announced that she rejected the policies of the “libertarian right” and vowed to “repair free markets.” This speech heralded the return of an industrial strategy to Britain, which was watered down somewhat but still displayed a worrying amount of fatal conceit. This conceit was in full display with the manifesto her advisers produced as the platform for the disastrous 2017 election. As Ryan Bourne of the Cato Institute pointed out, it contained proposals to reregulate the labor market, cap energy prices, and bash successful CEOs. Unsurprisingly, as the Conservative Party shifted leftwards, so did the electorate, resulting in the loss of David Cameron’s majority.
Yet despite the rebuke, May’s government continued in the paternalist fashion laid out in the manifesto. Perhaps most striking has been the complete capitulation to extreme environmentalist fads — most recently manifesting in bans for plastic straws, cotton buds, and stirrers from 2020. Whenever her government saw a problem, it moved to “clamp down,” legislate, and often exercise a ban.
And if all that’s not enough, The Guardian has a roundup of UK newspaper reactions to May’s resignation.
Theresa May had one job, and she wasted three years not doing it.
Tags: Brexit, Conservatives, environmentalism, Foreign Policy, Iain Murray, Madeleine Kearns, Theresa May, UK
Well said.
[…] On the one hand, the things Johnson is resigning for (sex scandals by underlings and breaking Flu Manchu restrictions) would never have brought down a major Democratic political figure on this side of the pond. On the other hand, beyond Brexit, one searches high and low in vain for a single conservative policy initiative that Johnson has pushed through. For all his press as a “Trump-like” figure, Johnson has none of Trump’s notable accomplishments in economics or foreign policy. Johnson seems no more successful a leader than the woman he replaced at Number 10 Downing Street, Theresa May. […]