Theresa May is a historic British Prime Minister. That she suffered the most crushing parliamentary defeat in the modern history of Britain assures her of a place in the annals of Western democracy. Her proposed Brexit plan received 432 votes against and only 202 in favour. No PM could emerge from that defeat, by 230 votes, with any authority. May now has none.
Where do we go from here?
First, it’s important to understand the magnitude of May’s incompetence. It would be wrong to think she had an impossible task. She had a difficult task. But she made at least four catastrophic, strategic misjudgments that led directly to yesterday’s mess in which there is no possible parliamentary majority for any form of Brexit, or indeed anything else.
May’s strategic disaster No 1 was the way she ran the 2017 general election. She, justifiably, called the election years early. Having replaced David Cameron as a consensus Conservative leader, she started the campaign 23 points ahead. But her campaign was a Monty Python parody of mishap. As one senior Canberra cabinet minister told me, it was the worst election campaign he had seen anywhere. She embraced radical social policy and then ran away from it without admitting her reversal. She bizarrely refused to debate Jeremy Corbyn. She wasted resources on seats she could never win and neglected seats she had to win. She was wooden and clunky and clumsy beyond measure. She ended up in minority government.
Strategic disaster No 2 was deciding to stay as Prime Minister after the election. Cameron had put EU membership to the British people in a referendum and strongly advocated they stay in the EU. When they voted 52 per cent to 48 per cent to leave, he realised he had lost all authority and could not implement something he had campaigned against. So he resigned. May should have followed this precedent. She had been a Remainer during the referendum and in the election shredded her authority and her government’s position. A new leader, necessarily a Brexiteer, would have had a much better chance than May of getting Brexit done.
Strategic disaster No 3 was not even to outline her preferred position on a future relationship with the EU until July last year, when she produced her disastrous Chequers plan. Senior cabinet figures resigned in protest at the degree of power it gave the EU over Britain and it was obvious that even if she could have negotiated the Chequers deal with Brussels, it would never have passed parliament.
This is because Labour would oppose any deal she gets and 60 or 80 Brexiteers in her own party, at least, would have opposed the Chequers deal.
Economist Liam Halligan, whose work influenced May in her pre-2017 election “Brexit means Brexit” phase, told me straight after the referendum what the obvious British position should have been. Britain should have offered the EU the closest possible free trade agreement, along the lines that Canada has with Brussels. If that turned out to be impossible, it should have chosen to leave under a managed no-deal scenario, meaning that like all non-European nations it would trade with the EU under World Trade Organisation rules.
It would have been publicly preparing for the no-deal option all the time it was negotiating, in good faith and with maximum good will, for an FTA.
The ardent Remainers in the Conservative Party would not have liked it but it would have been rational, clear, coherent and calm. And if the Conservative Remainers really hated it, they could have brought down their own government, leading to yet another election.
But whether it was a new government or the Tory Remainers acquiescing to a no-deal exit after the EU refused a good-faith FTA attempt, there would have been plenty of time to make a decision.
But May was too cowardly — I mean political cowardice, not personal cowardice — ever to bring the matter to a head.
So she used up the only resource she had — time.
Strategic disaster No 4 directly concerns time, and it was May’s crazy decision to pull her deal from consideration by the House of Commons five weeks ago in the hope that she could get concessions from the EU that would entice her colleagues to back her deal. She won no concessions and opinion against her deal hardened.
If she had put the matter to a vote five weeks ago, or preferably before that, she could not have lost by more than the 230 she lost by this week. But there would have been some time.
We are now left with three main possibilities. If May can cling on and time just runs out, Britain may yet get a no-deal Brexit. By pretending for two years that this was not a possibility she has ensured that if it happens it will occur in the most disorderly and damaging fashion possible.
The lack of any coherent position from her government has massively increased the power of the EU in the equation and EU leaders this week were brutally maximising her distress, with France’s Emmanuel Macron even threatening that planes might not fly between France and Britain under a no-deal scenario. In the end, the EU would be more pragmatic about no deal if it happens, but it would still be messy.
May’s dithering incompetence also has massively increased the internal polarisation within the Conservative Party, as no faction has ever had to accept or acknowledge defeat. So if she ever embraces no deal publicly, some of the Remainers in her party may vote no confidence in her government and bring about a fresh election, which Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party could well win by promising a second referendum to reverse the results of the first. A variation on this Conservative disunity could have parliament passing laws, against the government’s wishes, that seek to make a no-deal Brexit impossible. That would mean intense parliamentary guerilla warfare for the next several weeks.
And the third possibility is that May seeks from the EU an extension of the March 29 deadline to achieve what she always seems really to want — further pointless delay.
It is easy to be wise in hindsight but it is impossible to imagine the situation being handled worse. Sometimes a historic moment calls for fudges, equivocations and sliding compromises. Sometimes that’s honourable. But sometimes a leader has to make a choice. Winston Churchill chose total defiance and total war. Margaret Thatcher chose free-market reform and confrontation with the trade unions.
May has not chosen anything. And as a result, she has got nothing.
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