May Staggers into August Her days will grow short, when she reaches September. Weekly Standard, Aug 3, 2018, Dominic Green
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In 2016, after the Brexit referendum, David Cameron’s resignation, and the bungled candidacy of the excessively characterful Boris Johnson, Theresa May tiptoed into Downing Street. She was supposed to be organized and intelligent; she had survived a term at the graveyard of ambition that is the Home Office. She claimed to be capable of holding together a party riven over Europe, of rebinding a nation divided by Europe, and of steering Britain through Brexit. She has turned out to be the worst prime minister in living memory.
First, May lost her parliamentary majority through a poorly organized and foolish electoral campaign in 2017. Then she pursued a disastrous negotiating strategy with the E.U. over Brexit—if, that is, a program of surrender by stages can be called a strategy at all. Finally, in early July, she summoned her cabinet to the prime minister’s weekend home, Chequers, and secured its collective responsibility for a Brexit policy that reneged on her election promises of 2017 and subsequent policy statements.
The façade of unity lasted three days, until two of the stronger characters in the pro-Brexit camp, May’s foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, and her Brexit negotiator, David Davis, threw themselves on the fire. The policy lasted four days, until it came before the House of Commons. The European Research Group, the anti-E.U. faction among the Conservatives, added amendments that would nullify May’s proposal to keep Britain permanently under the E.U.’s legal suzerainty and partially inside its customs borders for goods. The remains of May’s dignity went the next day, when pro-E.U. Conservatives counterattacked with amendments designed to effectively keep Britain in the E.U. forever, a gambit that May defeated with the support of pro-Brexit Labour rebels. Next, Boris Johnson, who is usually given more to wit than intelligence, delivered a resignation speech so polite and reasonable that it can only have been a pitch for May’s job.
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