Why no one will miss Theresa May
Her tenure has been a disaster that saw the nadir for Conservative party
Right now, the votes are all but tallied up and down the United Kingdom to elect 55 new Members of the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Whether those MEPs will sit for three months, six months or two years has yet to be decided — but what is known for sure is that Nigel Farage, the leader of the Brexit party will be obnoxious in his gloating.
With a nation determined to press the self-destruct button — and for Farage to take so much joy in leaving the European Union — I find that offensive. It’s like laughing your way through a funeral, which is just rude and ignorant.
And over the coming week, Prime Minister Theresa May will be putting the Withdrawal Agreement Bill to a fourth vote in the House of Commons.
Yes, she organised cross-party talks with Labour to try and reach any sort of a consensus on some sort of deal that might somehow pass through parliament, but failed miserably.
Yes, she repackaged her Brexit wish list into a 10-point plan — it might as well have been 101, or 1001 — it has no chance of passing.
In the next few days, that bill will be defeated. And within days of that — possibly hours — Theresa May will resign and walk off through fields of wheat into the political sunset.
Her three years in charge of the Conservative party have been disastrous. She took a party that had a comfortable majority following the Brexit-defeat-forced departure of David Cameron, and turned it into a divided minority.
And to make matters worse, she reached out to the Democratic Unionist party of Northern Ireland — bigoted sheep in wolves’ clothing — for a parliamentary majority. That alone did more to set the peace process back in the febrile Irish province, simply by turning to a party that ignored the overwhelming majority there, who wanted Northern Ireland to remain part of the EU.
During her three years in office, she failed to act decisively with dissenters within her cabinet — ministers who undermined her weak authority even further by their leaks, objections, columns and criticising behind her back.
She failed to act against the one-third of her MPs who set up a party within a party and looked to the old Etonian Jacob Rees-Mogg as their leader.
She failed to come up with a comprehensive plan on Brexit, one that would have been acceptable to most of her party and to the ranks of a poorly-led Labour party as well.
She failed to intervene when it became clear that her transport minister could not organise a toy train set, never mind managing the nation’s privatised railways who answer not to the paying customers but to their shareholders.
She failed to haul her Foreign Secretary over the coals when he shot his mouth off on numerous occasions and bumbled his way through embassies and consular appearances the world over.
When terrorists struck in Manchester and London, May failed to understand that the British public was left vulnerable by a nation that had stripped more than 22,000 officers from front-line duty on the streets and communities — cuts that she oversaw while Home Secretary in the name of austerity.
Patients waiting for years
Her Health Secretary oversees a National Health Service that is haemorrhaging staff, disillusioned with the poor level of service that sees patients lying on stretchers in understaffed and underfunded hospitals, waiting years for hip replacements or other routine treatments.
She oversaw a nation that has witnessed knife crime increase each year over the past five years, leaving black youths in particular living in fear of others who feel they can act with impunity, little possibility of being caught, and no fear of sentencing when they are eventually brought before courts.
She has overseen a currency that has lost a quarter of its value and done nothing to inspire confidence in the ranks of business and corporate leadership.
And Brexit. Would that mess be any different if there was a different hand on the rudder?
Over the next weeks, there will be a different hand on that rudder. It will most likely be Boris Johnson — who will oversee a party that looks as if it has been passed through a cheese grater. Not that Labour is much better.
No, to this point, May’s leadership has been the nadir for the Conservative party. When Johnson takes over, sadly that bar will be shifted so much farther south.
She might even be missed.