Theresa May's Dates of Doom

 

For about the last three hundred years I've been saying that Theresa May is going to resign because she can't get her withdrawal agreement through Parliament. Obviously she hasn't resigned, but that's only because she's in some kind of personal head butting contest with Jeremy Corbyn, these two stubborn donkeys stood there honking and hooting at each other. She has kept her job a lot longer than I thought she would, and yet she never achieves anything by keeping it. It's like we've all been dragged into the worst performance of Waiting for Godot. Nothing happens. No one comes, no one goes. It's awful.
 

But I keep telling everyone it can't last much longer. For the last two years there's been an empty diary, but eventually the outside world was bound to intrude. There are events beginning to unfold which Theresa May can do nothing about and which by the end of it she won't have a job. Dates of destiny and doom.

 

May 2nd

Local elections. These are on everyone's radar by now, and they look like being a disaster for the Tories. They're the first electoral test for Theresa May since she muffed the general election, and she looks like losing a lot of seats. She'll be given the "blue rinse" treatment.

 

Around this time there is word of the blue rinsers setting up an Extraordinary General Meeting for the end of the month, where Theresa May's leadership will be put to scrutiny.

 

May 23rd

European elections. The second of Theresa May's election defeats, and this time she has lost before she starts. It's an election she was never supposed to fight, and all it can do is remind everyone of her failure to achieve anything in the line of Brexit. She can't even come out and campaign after having spent two years honking like a mad goose how we would have left the European Union by now.

 

June

This is where the EGM that was booked a month ago comes along. And if it looked bad a month ago, suddenly in the aftermath of two dreadful election defeats, this would be the first chance for the national members to shove Theresa May out the door. Technically they can't force her to resign, but in practical value, the party members in full mutiny, and her own MPs sick of her, the pressure to quit will be immense.

 

July

Labour will be advancing in the polls all the time, and while the Tories are busy packing Theresa May's bags and changing the locks, along comes the confidence and supply agreement up for review. The formal agreement between the Tories and DUP lasts for the entire parliament as defined from one general election to the next. But there is a clause in it that after two years either party can review the aims and implementation of it. If the DUP cry foul, or Theresa May can't vouch the guarantees they need, the Tories will be heading into summer recess as a minority government.

 

Summer recess from July to September. Possible Theresa May feels a bit safer, if she makes it this far. On the one hand parliament can't easily sack her, but she can't get anything done either. She hasn't really found a safe space, and the summer will be over soon enough.

 

September

This is where Theresa May's misfortune, or mad incompetence if you prefer, really begins to pay out. How clever she thought she was going to be, cooking up her schemes with Andrea Leadsom. Is there anybody you would less invite to a strategy meeting than this team? How they were going to have a two year parliament so that the next Queen's Speech came after Brexit, and the pair of them would enter parliament in ticker tape and triumph, our troubadours of Brexit hymning their odes to each other.

But instead of that they have to get a new Queen's Speech through parliament having failed to achieve any of the last one, and with nothing to show except two election defeats, the loss of her coalition partners and the fury of her own back benchers. It's likely there is no Queen's Speech she can get through, and her government collapses before she even gets to party conference.

Just pause to imagine what the Tory conference will be like if Theresa May is still suckered to the leadership like a limpet.

 

October 31st

The Brexit extension expires. Europe will most likely allow us another. The biggest problem with the last extension was what to do about European elections, and that question doesn't arise this time. The only question worth asking is, if Theresa May staggers on this far like a zombie that just manages not to fall over by sheer luck, can she ever get a withdrawal agreement through parliament?

I don't think she can.

Imagine the situation. We've had another Brexit extension till March next year. The immediate threat is lifted again. But the government is exhausted, Labour is on the rise, the SNP are up for a new referendum, Farage is taking chunks out of the Tories like piranha fish feeding on a stricken waterpig, their coalition partners won't talk to them.

How the world is going to look from the Tory benches six months from now. All they can see in front of them is the vision of a Corbyn government, and the SNP looking to dissolve the union. And day after day the polls will be telling them that labour is going to form the next government. The only thing that can keep them in government now is grim survival. Or temporarily.

 

December 12th

The moratorium on a leadership challenge finally expires in its normal course. If Theresa May has got this far, she won't get any further. Remembering how the Tory leadership works. It doesn't start with a challenger the way it used to in the olden days. It starts with a straightforward vote of confidence in Theresa May's leadership. Nobody stands against her, so all she has to do is convince the party that she is the best person to lead them out of all the other MPs available. Ladies and gentlemen of jury, would you choose:

 

A. The person who has failed to execute the only policy she set herself, and whose achievements to date are to lose her majority, lose two elections, lose her coalition partners, lose the same vote in parliament half a dozen times, and who has come out of the last three years with no policy, no credibility and in the present danger of destroying the union itself, which has weathered war and famine and everything pox to apocalypse but couldn't finally withstand the woodenheaded stupidities of Theresa May. Or

 

B. Someone else.

 

December is only the final dead end if she manages to get through all the other. The defeats, the humiliations, the mutinies, the succession of failures that are going to hit her one after the other over the course of the next few months.

I've been predicting Theresa May's resignation for the last two years, and I thought it would have come a long time before this. Obviously I was wrong because she didn't resign, but she should have done. She has kept her job but she hasn't achieved anything with it. All we've been waiting for, so it seems to me, is the great pudden heads of the Conservative Party to finally admit what I've said all along:

Theresa May will never get a withdrawal agreement through Parliament, and in the absence of it, she will resign and the Tories will abandon the whole idea. And for the last three years I've been waiting for the world to catch up.