Should she stay or should she go now? asks Nigel Hastilow
Theresa May is set to go ‘on and on’ like a latter-day Margaret Thatcher – at least that’s what some people would have us believe.
But rumours of her political longevity have been greatly exaggerated by all those hacks looking for a row to kick off the start of the new season.
It all started on a trip to Japan when there was some gossip and speculation that she had pencilled in a date in 2019 for her departure from Downing Street after securing a satisfactory Brexit.
That forced the Prime Minister to go ‘on the record’ and answer a couple of direct questions from ITN. Note the actual questions and answers. She was asked: “There has been a lot of speculation about your future recently. Do you intend to fight the next election?”
The first word of her reply was ‘yes’ but she did not say ‘yes, I intend to fight the next election’. All she actually said was: “Yes, there’s been an awful lot of speculation about my future which has absolutely no basis in it whatsoever. I’m in this for the long-term.”
She was then asked: “So you’re not going to quit before the next election?” to which she replied with headline-grabbing certainty: ‘I’m not a quitter’.
That was enough to set the speculators rushing about warning Mrs May she couldn’t go ‘on and on’ while scorned and furious women like ex-Minister Anna Soubry foamed at the mouth about ‘macho posturing’. But Mrs May did not actually say she would fight the next election, due in 2022, as Conservative leader. She spoke about ‘the long-term’ and not being a quitter.
As Harold Wilson said, ‘a week is a long time in politics’, so ‘the long-term’ can be very short indeed.
Even if she means what she says – a big assumption based on her track record – she did not say she would fight the 2022 election. And she has no choice but to pretend she will keep going indefinitely. David Cameron foolishly set a time limit on his Premiership during the 2015 election campaign.
As a result he became a lame-duck Prime Minister which helps explain why he lost the Brexit referendum and had to go earlier than intended.
Mrs May can’t afford to make the same mistake because as soon as she sets a time limit on her tenure, whatever authority she still possesses will evaporate overnight. She would lose control of a pretty uncontrollable cabinet, see her Parliamentary party at war with itself and open the door to a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour takeover.
For the next 18 months or more, she will have her work cut out struggling through vote after vote in the Commons as the country edges ever more unhappily towards a Brexit cliff-edge.
She will have to deal with the unscrupulous – but politically-expedient – Labour U-turn on Brexit which now seems to mean it’s Jeremy Corbyn’s official position to stay in the EU in all but name.
Labour has gone for the Hotel California option – you can check out any time you like but you can never leave – which dismays Brexiteers like ex-MP Gisela Stuart who realise ‘people will see it as a way of not leaving at all’.
It is also an easy ruse which allows Labour to harry the Government in every Parliamentary vote over Brexit for the next 18 months.
Labour may have gone into this year’s election on the side of its voters – the vast majority of whom voted to leave the EU – but it’s blatantly unscrupulous U-turn is deliberately aimed at making life as nasty as possible for the Tories. It could even lead to Parliamentary stalemate over withdrawal from the EU.
But its main aim is to bring down the Government. Which is why Conservative MPs have no choice but to rally round Mrs May.
She won’t quit because she can’t quit. The Tories won’t let her. They desperately need her to finish what she’s started and get through the Brexit thickets with the least damage to the party – and, incidentally, to the country – as possible.
It would be political suicide for the Tories to get rid of Mrs May any time soon. There will be plots and rows, speculation and jockeying for position, but the last thing the Conservatives want is anything that might trigger another election.
If Labour’s plots succeed, we might get one anyway. But it won’t be until we finally gain the sunlit uplands of a post-Brexit Britain – or the whole thing ends in fiasco – that Mrs May will be allowed to depart. That should be a couple of years before the next election, giving the Tories a chance to choose a new leader and leave the winner time to get established before submitting themselves to the voters.
For now, the Tories have to stick with Mrs May. And though she may not be a quitter, in a couple of years’ time she will have no choice but to quit.