“Yes!!! Finally the old dragon is gone!!! Pushed out by her own party over Europe!!!”
About whom am I writing? Theresa May?
Well, no. The above words were spoken after a huge sigh of relief on November 28, 1990, after then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was driven away from No.10 Downing Street for the last time, having resigned when Deputy Prime Minister Geoffrey Howe resigned, followed by a leadership challenge from Michael Heseltine, which had gone to a second ballot.
I remember that day well. I remember it because I was working in a Westminster City Council library, on Marylebone Road, and some of the staff, not exactly Thatcherites, went out and bought a bottle of champagne. To celebrate Thatcher’s downfall. Because she refused to entertain the thought of joining the Exchange Rate Mechanism, which went on to become European Monetary Union, which went on to become the Euro.
Despite Mrs Thatcher’s resignation, and former Chancellor John Major taking the job, Britain never did join the Euro, never did drive on the right, and never did swap its miles per hour for kilometers per hour.
Therefore, we as a nation have had a soft Brexit since 1993.
Fast forward 28 years or so (God!!! Is it really that long?) and this very day, May 24, 2019, Britain’s second female Prime Minister, Mrs Theresa May, resigned after all but being pushed out of her own party by MPs frustrated over Europe. Does it sound familiar? It should do.
In her resignation speech, Mrs May alluded to the fact that she was the second female British Prime Minister, but certainly not the last. Of the potential candidates for her replacement, there are two who have declared their candidacy, while four others are thought to be considering a stand, who are female. No reason to suppose that there will not be two consecutive female Prime Ministers in a row, although Boris Johnson, former guest host of Have I Got News For You, and the man I like to call BloJo, is the front runner and evens favourite to win the job.
God help us.
I have suggested elsewhere that, should BloJo get the job, two of the West’s biggest allies, the UK and the USA, will be run by ginger maniacs, barely distinguishable the one from the other, between Donald Toilet – sorry, John – Trump and Boris Johnson.
God help us.
Today, the Financial Times published an article which spelled out its view of the future of the UK after Brexit. It’s not good. I wish I could link to the article, but sadly, it will not let me do so without a subscription, so, if you’ve not used up your free article limit, go to the Financial Times‘ website and search for:
Copy and paste that, because I got that title from their website. Many apologies for not being able to link it.
One interesting statistic that it discusses is that not only was Brexit a largely English phenomenon, but that the majority of Brexit voters lived in rural areas; most of those in large towns and cities voted to remain, with a few exceptions. It also characterised Brexit as a runaway train.
Yes, that’s exactly it, and its driver is David Cameron, who lost control of the train within 24 hours of starting the journey. His staff, the Conservative Party, said, ah, Theresa May will do it, get Britain out of the EU quickly and easily, because after all, she campaigned for Remain, didn’t she?
Promising to stand by the Referendum result of 2016, and putting Theresa May in charge of departure once they decided to call the whims of around 600,000 people ‘the will of the people,’ were two of the most calamitous political decisions ever made in the Twentieth Century, and that century had two world wars in it.
Mrs May wanted to Remain in the EU, she campaigned for it, and during that campaign she spelled out the reasons why the UK would be better off in the European Union. Then, as Prime Minister in charge of Brexit, she spelled out, with equal passion, the reasons why the UK would, in “her mind,” be better off out of the EU.
She, and Nigel Farage, are the two most obvious examples of politicians lying to our faces, but I am sure there are many more, particularly within the context of Brexit. If you are reading this from the US, you will know that both Trump and Clinton lied to you during the election campaign during that momentous year of 2016.
You will know that previous presidents have lied to you about wars, and rumours of wars – Vietnam was subject to a massive series of cover-ups, as were both wars in Iraq of 1991 and 2003.
Back to the present. Back to Brexit. So much has been written and talked about it that I sincerely believe that there is nothing more to say that hasn’t been said already. I suppose in part because of social media, and the internet in general, it has been possible to gauge more accurately the amount of discourse that has taken place over it, much more so than previous political crises. Maybe many people wrote down their own private thoughts about World War Two, say, in 1939, but of course then there was nowhere for those thoughts to go, except maybe in a bin or at the bottom of a box in the loft, or similar.
Theresa May fought for her vision of Brexit, which was a “Brexit Lite,” and in many ways merely a slightly altered version of the Brexit we have already had since 1992, when the Maastricht treaty was signed. We never joined the Euro – remember all that Exchange Rate Mechanism business around 1992? We had loads of trade deals with the EU, that profited both us and them. That’s the essence of a fair trade deal. But the Euro threatened to beat us around the head as we sat on the netty of our European involvement. Boy, were we glad when countries that used it began to go down one after the other, like dominoes, after the major financial crash of 2008: Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal…
But Brexiteers wanted to kick all that away, completely remove ourselves from every advantage that belonging to the EU has, pull up our drawbridge across the English Channel, and go home. And they chose Mrs May to do it. But she had a completely different vision of Brexit than they did. It still appears crazy to me that they even elected her; far more stupid than Labour’s election of Jeremy Corbyn as their leader.
She negotiated, and she fought. She negotiated with the EU, taking all the credit herself, by the way, and she fought her own party and her own parliament. She thought she could take them all on alone and defeat them, the Brexiteers, like John Wayne punching the lights out of ten bad guys on his own, standing over their writhing bodies, and drawling “Let’s get out of here!” with a wry smile.
Sadly, that vision she had in her mind was not to become a reality. The rebels in her party, and Parliament in general, were simply too strong for her. She had to go, and on May 24, she finally admitted defeat. No wonder she was in tears.
Or are the reasons for those tears really that obvious? Were they tears for the country that she loved, for her failed ambition, for herself as a failed Prime Minister, for her dog, for what? There are so many options to choose from that, unless she says so at a later date (and she is honest about it, of course), we’re never really going to know the correct answer.
From July 2016, when Mrs May was elected, it was all sadly so inevitable that she would go and be replaced by yet another unelected Prime Minister in Boris Johnson. The only surprise here is that it has taken so long, almost three years, but that can be easily put down to her own personal ego.
I used the title Mrs May May Resign in May because it was an attempt to be clever, despite the fact that it is inaccurate on so many levels. Mrs May is going to resign in June, on June 7 to be exact, and then stay on in the job, should another national crisis occur, until the party has managed to choose itself a new leader, one who will automatically become the next Prime Minister of Great Britain. And one, no doubt the rhetoric will exclaim, who will immediately unite the party and the country from its deep division, wider than Moses’ parting of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments (1956), over Brexit and its implications for the UK and its national identity. x
Stephen Butler - Rant Music 