Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

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To stand for election as leader of the Conservative Party was a mistake because Theresa May has neither the imagination nor flexibility for successful leadership in times of division and change.

She tried to build a coalition between two opposing views within the Tory party, when she should have been building a coalition for a sensible Brexit across the House of Commons from like minded MPs from all parties. This would have given her a substantial majority.

She failed to understand, like many others, that the Union would not survive, in the long term, a hard Brexit. First Northern Ireland will link up with the the Republic of Ireland to preserve the Peace Agreement and to remain in the EU, which is what the majority  in NI voted for . Later Scotland will peel off to join the EU. Spain has declared Scotland will be welcome.

She also failed to see that to preserve the Union and avoid acute social and economic disruption in the short to medium term, the ‘clean break’ notion of Brexit was undeliverable.  Both require the UK remaining in the Customs Union and the Single Market.

She called an election and lost it.

May then made the big mistake of inviting the DUP, a Leave party, out off step with Northern Ireland which voted remain, to be the partners to prop up her government which, because of her other mistakes, was now fatally split on the key issue of the day. During the critical months of negotiation this gave the hard Brexiteers too strong a hand, which when they finally played it, turned out to be much weaker than they thought at every level. This finally showed her attempts to appease them not only futile, but unnecessary.

The outcome of this string of leadership mis-steps is political chaos and a national crisis. May believes she can tough it out, even suffer the loss of the vote for her deal tomorrow, and somehow find a way through to deliver a workable Brexit which will satisfy everybody. That could turn out to be one of the most remarkable ‘leadership from the edge’ success stories ever,  or her biggest mistake of all.