Inside Out | Theresa May’s election blunder a sobering example of leadership latching onto the wrong message
May’s perhaps-fatally wounded government must in a week’s time begin engagement on a Brexit deal that will do least harm
In April, after Theresa May announced her shock general election, I called it a “political masterstroke … that made me feel that all is not lost for Britain in the Brexit process”. Whoops. Excuse me while I wipe the egg off my face.
I went on: “If she wins her snap election with a historic landslide on June 8, as most pundits expect, May will have achieved multiple Houdini miracle escapes at one go.” She would get off her back the hardline Brexit fringe that was threatening to hold her to ransom in the exit process; she would win herself the flexibility to make the difficult and perhaps unpalatable compromises that would inevitably have to be made with the European Union in the exit negotiations.
As May put it at the time: “Every vote for the Conservative Party will make me stronger when I negotiate for Britain.”
Now segue forward to this weekend. What on earth happened in the 50 days between April 18 and June 8 as she has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory? The best single summary for me came from Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times, who traced “a complex story that takes in her own limitations as a leader, the surprise vigour of Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, the awakening of young voters who see EU exit as a menace to their future, public weariness of tight fiscal policy and a new national appetite for upheaval”.
Certain things can be concluded with simple starkness. May called the election to win endorsement for her Brexit strategy and was resoundingly rebutted. To twist her words in April, “every vote against the Conservative Party has made her weaker”. No Houdini miracle escapes here.