This blog has already commentated on the political game changer of Labour’s decision to back the UK staying in the customs union and single market. Now May has seized the moment and announced that she is, in political terms, here for keeps, i.e. until after the 2022 general election. This turns on its head the supposition that she would go at latest in 2019 and more likely much sooner. It also re-establishes effective government both at home and abroad because once again there is a prime minister in charge of the government, rather than the reverse. Whatever your politics that is good news, because a leaderless country is bad for everybody.
And it is a leaderless country in which we have been living since the June Tory electoral disaster. To the rest of the world the UK and Brexit has become a rudderless muddle drifting in a sea of its own disunity and unable to articulate the specifics of its aims. The reality is that May was too damaged to exert her authority, Davis, Boris and Fox were running Brexit and Hammond was struggling to get them to recognise the economic priorities of the whole project. The rest of the cabinet was demonstrating serial incompetence in departmental management.
But times have changed. Labour has taken a Brexit posture supported by business, the City, trade unions, science and the majority of voters. Boris has become an international joke and a national embarrassment, variously branded with the attention span lasting only moments, a liar and a clown. Davis is making very heavy weather indeed of the Brexit negotiations and the EU is becoming exasperated, as are foreign investors and business leaders. Fox is revealed as a fantasist who knows next to nothing about the realities of business and trade.
There is absolutely nobody who could seriously mount a leadership challenge without bringing the whole government down in the process. The Tory party had one helluva fright in June. It is not going to throw itself over the edge now. It knows its survival and May’s cannot now be separated. May has several things running for her. Her rivals are discredited, there is nothing the Brits, especially Tories, love more than a loser who bounces back and if she can deliver a form of Brexit which does not seriously damage and disrupt the economy, she has a pretty fair chance of winning outright in 2022. Interestingly we are now seeing the real May, freed from the clutches of that odd couple kicked out of Downing Street after June 8th. She could turn out to be more formidable rather than less. Instead of being forced to cut off her right arm, she may have freed it from a bind.
The EU will be pleased to have a leader it can rely on from the UK once again. Labour will have to rise to a challenge it was not expecting to face. Its best chance is to bring down the government within the next eighteen months. There might be good opportunities to do that.
Politics will get exciting again.