LONDON — In the final season of Game of Thrones, a once-powerful and arrogant queen stands almost alone at the top of her castle, abandoned by the multitudes who once feared and followed her, her strategies in ruins, watching with dulled horror as her enemy swoops closer, burning her city down. At the last, as she flees down a staircase, even her most trusted champion deserts her, leaving her to fight a battle of his own. Only the man who loves her is by her side at the end.
That was how Theresa May’s premiership ended this week, wrecked by her blindness and secretive obstinacy, in loneliness, desertion and despair. Not a single minister emerged to defend her when her final plans to get a Brexit deal through parliament were published on Tuesday, to be met by fury from the right wing of her own Conservative Party and contempt from the opposition.
Their silence said everything. Her own aides finally stopped pretending that she had a future. Her former chief adviser had already told her publicly that she must resign to avoid Britain’s national humiliation. Cabinet members who had stood doggedly by her privately told members of Parliament and journalists that she was finished.
“She’s not getting a hearing, everybody’s given up on her,” said one member of Mrs. May’s cabinet. “By now, whatever doubt there is, Theresa is not going to enjoy the benefit of it,” said another. All her Brexit proposals ended in failure, including her last-minute attempt to find a compromise solution that might appeal to the Labour Party. Her credibility had been shot. Hard-line backbenchers were denouncing her, newspaper headlines read “desperate, deluded, doomed” and the Conservative Party’s grass roots around the country were believed to pushing to change their party’s rules in order to get her out.
Without a plan, a purpose, or any possibilities remaining, Mrs. May’s premiership had lost its point. Only her fiercely loyal husband still believed that the problem lay solely with the conniving and sniping of other politicians, not his wife.
It would be understandable to feel sympathy for anyone so isolated and vilified. I don’t. Mrs. May has been destroyed by her own fatal decisions.
Delivering Brexit was always going to be difficult, because it had been sold on a lie — that leaving would be simple and the future prosperous. The exact nature of any Brexit had been kept deliberately vague by the leading Brexiteers.
Mrs. May, as the first prime minister after the 2016 Brexit referendum, could have minimized those difficulties by exposing that lie, and by seeking a Brexit that kept Britain’s economy close to Europe’s while honoring the decision to leave. She had the power to define what Brexit meant. From the start she could have sought a consensus across Parliament.
Tragically she chose instead to pander to the her party’s right wing and its backers in the news media, promising to quit both the European Union’s single market and its customs union, and ceaselessly repeating the disastrous idea that “no deal is better than a bad deal.” Her decisions in those first months were calamitous; they framed Brexit as a sharp break from Europe and turned it from a problem to a disaster.
For a few months she basked in the short-lived political rewards. The Tory press offered calculated adoration, praising the new Iron Lady and admiring her steel, ambition, boldness and leadership.
Carried away by their sycophancy, reveling in her novel popularity and buoyed by a healthy lead in opinion polls, Mrs. May called an election to bolster the tiny parliamentary majority she had inherited. Instead, her campaign exposed her as the stolid, charmless, unconvincing politician she is. As one disillusioned colleague says, “She is very hardworking. But she can’t construct a song, or write poetry. And if you’re driving big change you must infuse that either with drama or with lyricism.” Instead of expanding her majority in Parliament, she lost it and was forced to beg support from a small, far-right Northern Irish party. Mrs. May went from being the blank screen onto which every Tory or Brexiteer could project their hopes, to the humiliated and compromised leader of a minority administration.
From this every subsequent disaster followed. “If you lose an election and have no majority, you have to change strategy. Theresa didn’t,” says one cabinet minister. “She saw the instruction to complete Brexit as akin to a directive in the will of a much-loved great-aunt, so she kept going.” Mrs. May stubbornly pursued a hard Brexit though she had neither the mandate nor the votes to back it, and the need to avoid resurrecting a physical border in Northern Ireland made it impossible to deliver.
Her support crumbled as emboldened hard-liner rebels like Boris Johnson defied her, resigning from Cabinet and pushing for the “no-deal” Brexit she had legitimized as better than a “bad deal.” Mrs. May was stranded with a shrinking constituency within her party, but even last November, when the deal she had finally negotiated with the European Union was defeated in the House of Commons by the largest margin in British history, she refused to explore the possibility of seeking consensus in Parliament by working with moderates in both parties. She finally opened doomed talks with the Labour Party seven weeks ago only because she had no options left.
“The trouble with Theresa is that she only recognizes reality when it hits her in the face,” one exasperated ex-cabinet minister told me. “She never games the outcomes, and won’t discuss them, so she can’t think two or three steps ahead. Only when line A is completely impossible will she switch to line B.” This politician had been urging Mrs. May since 2017 to compromise and seek allies. “But she never tried. She finally did the right thing, but two years too late.”
Mrs. May’s battle is over, her exultant rivals unleashed. Unlike the Queen of Westeros, she is not a wicked woman; but her serial stubborn stupidity is unforgivable. The legacy she leaves, the curdled, purist view of Brexit she has helped to shape, is a poisonous one. It will frame the Conservative Party’s leadership contest now. She cried as she resigned today, but the grief should be for the country she damaged, not herself.
Jenni Russell (@jennirsl) is a columnist for The Times of London and a contributing opinion writer.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
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Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | Theresa May Meets Her Lonely End
Opinion | Theresa May Meets Her Lonely End
LONDON — In the final season of Game of Thrones, a once-powerful and arrogant queen stands almost alone at the top of her castle, abandoned by the multitudes who once feared and followed her, her strategies in ruins, watching with dulled horror as her enemy swoops closer, burning her city down. At the last, as she flees down a staircase, even her most trusted champion deserts her, leaving her to fight a battle of his own. Only the man who loves her is by her side at the end.
That was how Theresa May’s premiership ended this week, wrecked by her blindness and secretive obstinacy, in loneliness, desertion and despair. Not a single minister emerged to defend her when her final plans to get a Brexit deal through parliament were published on Tuesday, to be met by fury from the right wing of her own Conservative Party and contempt from the opposition.
Their silence said everything. Her own aides finally stopped pretending that she had a future. Her former chief adviser had already told her publicly that she must resign to avoid Britain’s national humiliation. Cabinet members who had stood doggedly by her privately told members of Parliament and journalists that she was finished.
“She’s not getting a hearing, everybody’s given up on her,” said one member of Mrs. May’s cabinet. “By now, whatever doubt there is, Theresa is not going to enjoy the benefit of it,” said another. All her Brexit proposals ended in failure, including her last-minute attempt to find a compromise solution that might appeal to the Labour Party. Her credibility had been shot. Hard-line backbenchers were denouncing her, newspaper headlines read “desperate, deluded, doomed” and the Conservative Party’s grass roots around the country were believed to pushing to change their party’s rules in order to get her out.
Without a plan, a purpose, or any possibilities remaining, Mrs. May’s premiership had lost its point. Only her fiercely loyal husband still believed that the problem lay solely with the conniving and sniping of other politicians, not his wife.
It would be understandable to feel sympathy for anyone so isolated and vilified. I don’t. Mrs. May has been destroyed by her own fatal decisions.
Delivering Brexit was always going to be difficult, because it had been sold on a lie — that leaving would be simple and the future prosperous. The exact nature of any Brexit had been kept deliberately vague by the leading Brexiteers.
Mrs. May, as the first prime minister after the 2016 Brexit referendum, could have minimized those difficulties by exposing that lie, and by seeking a Brexit that kept Britain’s economy close to Europe’s while honoring the decision to leave. She had the power to define what Brexit meant. From the start she could have sought a consensus across Parliament.
Tragically she chose instead to pander to the her party’s right wing and its backers in the news media, promising to quit both the European Union’s single market and its customs union, and ceaselessly repeating the disastrous idea that “no deal is better than a bad deal.” Her decisions in those first months were calamitous; they framed Brexit as a sharp break from Europe and turned it from a problem to a disaster.
For a few months she basked in the short-lived political rewards. The Tory press offered calculated adoration, praising the new Iron Lady and admiring her steel, ambition, boldness and leadership.
Carried away by their sycophancy, reveling in her novel popularity and buoyed by a healthy lead in opinion polls, Mrs. May called an election to bolster the tiny parliamentary majority she had inherited. Instead, her campaign exposed her as the stolid, charmless, unconvincing politician she is. As one disillusioned colleague says, “She is very hardworking. But she can’t construct a song, or write poetry. And if you’re driving big change you must infuse that either with drama or with lyricism.” Instead of expanding her majority in Parliament, she lost it and was forced to beg support from a small, far-right Northern Irish party. Mrs. May went from being the blank screen onto which every Tory or Brexiteer could project their hopes, to the humiliated and compromised leader of a minority administration.
From this every subsequent disaster followed. “If you lose an election and have no majority, you have to change strategy. Theresa didn’t,” says one cabinet minister. “She saw the instruction to complete Brexit as akin to a directive in the will of a much-loved great-aunt, so she kept going.” Mrs. May stubbornly pursued a hard Brexit though she had neither the mandate nor the votes to back it, and the need to avoid resurrecting a physical border in Northern Ireland made it impossible to deliver.
Her support crumbled as emboldened hard-liner rebels like Boris Johnson defied her, resigning from Cabinet and pushing for the “no-deal” Brexit she had legitimized as better than a “bad deal.” Mrs. May was stranded with a shrinking constituency within her party, but even last November, when the deal she had finally negotiated with the European Union was defeated in the House of Commons by the largest margin in British history, she refused to explore the possibility of seeking consensus in Parliament by working with moderates in both parties. She finally opened doomed talks with the Labour Party seven weeks ago only because she had no options left.
“The trouble with Theresa is that she only recognizes reality when it hits her in the face,” one exasperated ex-cabinet minister told me. “She never games the outcomes, and won’t discuss them, so she can’t think two or three steps ahead. Only when line A is completely impossible will she switch to line B.” This politician had been urging Mrs. May since 2017 to compromise and seek allies. “But she never tried. She finally did the right thing, but two years too late.”
Mrs. May’s battle is over, her exultant rivals unleashed. Unlike the Queen of Westeros, she is not a wicked woman; but her serial stubborn stupidity is unforgivable. The legacy she leaves, the curdled, purist view of Brexit she has helped to shape, is a poisonous one. It will frame the Conservative Party’s leadership contest now. She cried as she resigned today, but the grief should be for the country she damaged, not herself.
Jenni Russell (@jennirsl) is a columnist for The Times of London and a contributing opinion writer.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Source: Read Full Article