Why Theresa May's failings are the right's failings

Theresa May failed. She failed to unite her party or the country. She failed to convince new voters or old ones. She failed to plot a viable path for Brexit, failed to set out the necessary compromises when she had the chance, failed to win the argument when she finally did so, failed to crack the whip with her cabinet or her restive backbenchers. She failed to reach out to Labour backbenchers until it was too late.

She failed to do much more than talk about 'burning injustices', a topic that seemed to interest her most when she was thinking of her legacy. She failed to be less of a failure than her catastrophic predecessor—under whom her only success as Home Secretary was hiding her failings from view until she'd left the crime scene. Given the context of her arrival at Number 10, failure was always a possibility, maybe a probability—but her failings made it a certainty.

But Theresa May's failings are not hers alone. Her failure is intertwined with the failures of the Conservative Party and the broader political right.

It is worth recalling that for her first ten months as leader, May's approval ratings were high. Her honeymoon period wasn't simply the goodwill accorded to new incumbents. It was a combination of her embodiment of a 'serious' approach to politics that stood in contrast to David Cameron's breezy game-playing, a willingness among most voters to accept Brexit, and her stated desire to move beyond harsh austerity towards a more emollient approach towards some of those suffering under its weight. It also helped that she wasn't Jeremy Corbyn, at that stage both under attack and out of his depth as leader of the opposition.

What went wrong was a three-way collision between May, the Tories, and reality.

The Leave campaign's referendum victory was built on immigration. Brexit revisionists like to downplay this now, either because—like Vote Leave strategist Dominic Cummings—they consider themselves above such dog whistles, or—like Nigel Farage—they see little use now in demanding measures that May has already promised.

But during the referendum campaign, both Leave.EU and Vote Leave relentlessly focused on immigration, constructing endless scares and smears about Turkish membership and Syrian refugees. Cummings claimed that staying in the EU would mean the Cologne sex attackers would be free to travel to the UK. Few voters were interested in customs unions and trade deals. Brexit was built with the bruises of immigrants.

As May took office, it seemed the Brexit dividing line would be between those who wanted to stay in the single market, thus keeping free movement of people, and those who wished to cut immigration and leave.

Instead, in what proved to be one of the most disastrous prime ministerial speeches ever, May set out impossibly hardline demands in her Lancaster House speech in January 2017—out of the single market; out of the Customs Union; out of the reach of the European Court of Justice. In doing so, she handcuffed herself to a fantasy.

Her party threw away the key. A Tory membership that could most politely be called ‘obsessed’ held both her and her MPs to her words, no matter how impossible it became to deliver them. With the European Research Group of pro-Brexit backbenchers demanding an ever-purer departure from Europe, May had no option but to go to the country for a workable majority.

This is when the Tories' other failing kicked in: their failure to have a single original economic thought in 35 years. While the party's disastrous 2017 manifesto was the work of May and her overpromoted adviser Nick Timothy, its real flaw was the chancellor, Philip Hammond, who simply refused to give his leader the fiscal leeway to increase public spending as voters by then demanded.

Austerity was no longer hitting easily demonised targets such as the unemployed; schools and hospital were feeling the squeeze. People on middle incomes were losing patience.

Yet Hammond would brook no loosening of austerity, while Thatcherite backbenchers baulked at counter-revolutionary heresies such as workers on company boards. May lacked the ideological bandwidth of Rab Butler in any event, but the 2017 manifesto, which would supposedly redraw the political and ideological map, instead spilled permanent ink over her own party's territory.

May defeated herself by backing what she opposed—pledging a harder Brexit than she ultimately tried to deliver, and convincing Leave voters that 'no deal is better than a bad deal' when she never believed it herself. She wanted to neuter the ERG, but by aping their rhetoric she ended up beholden to them. She wanted to oust Hammond, but by keeping him in position she wrecked her own campaign and rendered him unsackable.

But the bigger picture is of a Conservative Party, and a political right, that refuses to see outside itself. Drunk on the validation of working class Leave votes, it reduces working class demands to No Deal Brexit and nothing else. It treats neoliberalism as an unquestionable religion. It dismisses Remain voters, university graduates, young people, “liberals,” “metropolitans,” virtually the entirety of its imagination of London, as unpeople to define itself against.

Having driven Britain to the edge of a cliff, the mainstream right finds itself powerless to stop the worst and most dangerous people in British politics—Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage—from pushing it off. For too long the right accepted no truth beyond the lies it told itself. The rest of the country has no such luxury.