As harassment row grows, May’s Cabinet wobbles towards final crash

It has been more than a week since the sexual harassment scandal triggered by multiple accusations of assault against the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein spread to Westminster. Yet with new alleged victims and perpetrators emerging every day, there feels still some way to go before the whirlwind of accusation and counteraccusation blows itself out.

While the gusts continue to swirl around it, the government resembles a game of Jenga, a teetering tower of wooden blocks struggling to stay aloft as, one by one, pieces are removed.

So far, we have had one Cabinet resignation — Sir Michael Fallon from Defence — and an investigation has been launched into the conduct of another, First Secretary Damian Green. Six more Cabinet ministers are rumoured to fear they could be next to be swept up in the scandal.

The problem for Prime Minister Theresa May as she seeks desperately to shore up her government is that hers is a tower built with a fault line through it, one that upsets the equilibrium and makes the game ever harder to play. As with so much in British politics at the moment, that fault line goes by the name of Brexit, which, to mix the metaphor, lies like a rotten apple at the heart of government, slowly infecting all the healthy fruit around it.

Brought to office by the overnight collapse of David Cameron’s administration in the EU referendum, and inheriting as she did a party riven by the Europe question, the prime minister was required to construct her government carefully, including fair representation of both sides of the Brexit divide.

The challenge of maintaining that balance was made more difficult following the loss of her majority last June. And without the strength in numbers of a healthy majority, every departure from the government creates a three-dimensional problem, one which, with her hesitant touch, she struggles to resolve.

So even something as seemingly unrelated to Britain’s membership of the EU as the matter of whether Sir Michael did or did not suggest to a colleague she place her hands somewhere unmentionable, is ultimately brought back to the question of Brexit.

It should not matter that the outgoing Defence Secretary is a Remainer and the woman said to have accused him of making fruity remarks, Commons Leader Andrea Leadsom, a fervent Leaver, but in May’s shaky Cabinet, it does.

So her attempt to balance the Jenga blocks out by elevating a Remainer, the former Chief Whip Gavin Williamson, to replace the one she lost in Sir Michael has served to further destabilise the edifice, leading to complaints both at her new Defence Secretary’s inexperience and the perception she is lining him up as her successor. For May, the real crisis will come if the investigation into Green, a close friend for more than 40 years and de facto deputy prime minister, finds substance in claims he made unwelcome sexual advances towards a young Tory activist and family friend.

— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2017

Rosa Prince is the online political editor for the Telegraph.