Politics

May resignation: until our leaders have the bravery to admit Brexit can’t be finished, Brexit will finish them

The next PM will face the same immovable objects and will fare no better than the woman they defenestrated

May 24, 2019
Photo: Alberto Pezzali/Xinhua News Agency/PA Images
Photo: Alberto Pezzali/Xinhua News Agency/PA Images

In the end Theresa May could run from the voters, her colleagues and political reality, but not herself. The prime minister lacked the imagination, social skills and political judgment usually required to ever become prime minister, and her hubris defeated her as soon as she did. Nobody forced her into the job and for months her colleagues tried to force her out of it. Now she has finally bowed to the inevitable, and no tears on the podium can excuse the personal failure and national chaos which will define her premiership.

The unique problem for Britain is that we have shed the worst prime minister of modern times but not the disaster she attempted to manage. May’s manifest unsuitability for her job helped shield the far more fundamental truth: that Brexit itself is the country’s catastrophe. May could be replaced by Winston Churchill and the outcome would still prove unacceptable to Leavers, Remainers and parliament.

Consider the months of futility which await us. May will cling on (if her party allows her) for two more weeks, in which she will preside over the likely routing in the European elections and Peterborough by-election, and the agony of Donald Trump’s state visit, just the third ever by a US president. In normal times it would be unthinkable for a British prime minister to host such an important bilateral summit after she has already resigned, and the visit (which would already have been excruciating) will prove almost unendurably humiliating. These are not normal times.

May will resign on 7th June, and immediately afterwards the self-indulgent navel-gazing begins. The Tory leadership campaign will expose the party as overwhelmingly pro-Brexit. The next prime minister will likely favour a destructive departure or no-deal, because that is the preoccupation of the Tory membership. There would be no going back from that: the party would be unelectable for a generation.

In the short term, the new PM should be in place by the summer recess, and bed in until September, as May herself did in the “phoney war” of 2016. Then parliament will gather for a few weeks, before quickly breaking up again for the conference season. And so at the start of October, the PM will announce his or her brilliant new plan for Brexit, no doubt involving a comprehensive renegotiation of the backstop followed by a resounding endorsement in parliament and tropically sunlit uplands forever more. Conference will cheer its new patriot hero to the rafters.

The upshot to this is that we will not be leaving the EU on 31st October. There will simply be no time to negotiate. And so, hilariously, the first significant act of a prime minister elected to take Britain out of the EU will be to ask the EU to stay in it. If the prime minister declined to request such an extension, parliament would resurrect the Cooper bill and simply force them.

What next? The truth, of course, is that no renegotiation could ever save a new PM. The Brexit power dynamic will not change, and neither will the backstop. The EU is prepared to alter the political declaration to include commitments to a permanent customs union or membership of the single market or both. But that would be anathema to the next Tory leader. The EU is, naturally, also prepared to revert to its initial backstop proposal, and limit it just to Northern Ireland. That would involve different tariffs and comprehensive customs checks between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. The PM might accept that but parliament never would. It would tear the Conservative and Unionist party apart.

When the EU approved the Brexit extension in April, European Council president Donald Tusk warned Britain “not to waste this time.” But that is all a new prime minister can do. They cannot put the current Withdrawal Agreement Bill back to parliament, because parliament has already signalled it will reject it. And so they will have to alter it. But how? If it includes the backstop, the DUP and hard-Brexit fringe will oppose it. If it doesn’t include a pledge for a referendum, the SNP, Change UK, Lib Dems and most of the Labour Party will.

So what is left? The leader could attempt to pivot to no-deal. No doubt they will have insisted for many months that such an outcome would be tolerable or even desirable. But there was no parliamentary appetite for self-immolation before and there will be none now. Any prime minister who sought to drive us off the cliff would be ejected before they even switched on the engine.

And so the end of this story is that nothing in it has changed. The new PM will be unable to pass the current deal through parliament, unable to renegotiate a new deal with Brussels, and unable to take us out of the EU with no deal at all. The Tory Party will be trapped in a hell entirely of its own making. Worse still, May will no longer be there to absorb the shock. Having successfully defenestrated their scapegoat, her successor will have to apportion blame closer to home.

Then finally, the truth. Brexit cannot be resolved because it was never meant to be. After three years and two defeated prime ministers, it lays waste to everything before it. The next prime minister will confront the same reality and the same disaster. The only roads out are a general election, which promises oblivion for the Tories and possibly also Labour, or a second referendum, which promises torture for the whole country. Until our leaders have the bravery to admit Brexit can’t be finished, Brexit will finish them.