Yesterday, at their joint press conference at Chequers, Donald Trump tried to make British Prime Minister Theresa May look good. This was after giving her a well-deserved kicking in a recent interview, highlighting her pathetic performance negotiating Brexit with the EU.
But make no mistake about it, May is still a political corpse. The only questions are when will they bury the body and how much will it stink out the political scene in the meantime?
Many people thought that she would be gone by now, following the resignation of senior Cabinet members and reports of Tory MPs sending in letters of no confidence to the 1922 Committee, which oversees these matters.
But although most of the Conservative MPs see May as an abject failure, the letters of no confidence are on hold. The anti-May forces have decided to hold their fire for two reasons.
The first reason is that they don't want to strike too early, as this could backfire. Once an obvious successor to May arises, those who disagree with the choice might try to rally round May, not because they support her but because they are using her to hold out for a different choice of successor. There are many factions in the Conservative Party.
For this reason, the Hard Brexiteers who form the core of the anti-May bloc is content to wait, in the certain knowledge that May can only become even more loathed, especially after the EU use her political weakness to extort yet more concessions. This should become clear after the Summer Recess (24th July - 4th September).
The second reason is that the UK could well be forced into making a shitty deal with the EU anyway, and any new leader who takes over too soon would merely end up accepting a poisoned chalice.
May has already given away almost all of the UK's leverage and bargaining chips, without getting anything in return, and is now at the EU's mercy, of which it has none. The EU knows that a "no deal" could cause severe, short-term economic disruption in the UK, and that this could be politically very costly for the UK government. This gives them the whip hand. In order to avoid this, the UK government might decide to sign any kind of deal offered by the EU. The thinking here is that once Britain is outside the Union, the bad deal can be improved and amended in future negotiations.
The problem here is that normal Conservative voters, the majority of whom support a hard Brexit, would hate any deal like this, and would probably defect to UKIP or not bother voting in a subsequent general election. This would give Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party a chance of power. But this is where May regains some usefulness.
The plan here is for the Conservative Party to hold their noses and vote through a bad deal, but then to hang it around May's neck while deposing her. Then it is hoped a new leader, who has not been tarnished by the deal, can come in and win back the voters with some hard-Brexit, "amend the deal" rhetoric. In short, the plan is to use May as a political scapegoat to get over an extremely big bump in the road.
If this can be done effectively, it would give the Conservative Party a fighting chance at the next election, and return a Prime Minister with a stronger majority, committed, at least on the face of it, to "fine-tuning" a soft Brexit deal into a harder one.
The deadline for all these political shenanigans is April 2019.
But make no mistake about it, May is still a political corpse. The only questions are when will they bury the body and how much will it stink out the political scene in the meantime?
Many people thought that she would be gone by now, following the resignation of senior Cabinet members and reports of Tory MPs sending in letters of no confidence to the 1922 Committee, which oversees these matters.
But although most of the Conservative MPs see May as an abject failure, the letters of no confidence are on hold. The anti-May forces have decided to hold their fire for two reasons.
The first reason is that they don't want to strike too early, as this could backfire. Once an obvious successor to May arises, those who disagree with the choice might try to rally round May, not because they support her but because they are using her to hold out for a different choice of successor. There are many factions in the Conservative Party.
For this reason, the Hard Brexiteers who form the core of the anti-May bloc is content to wait, in the certain knowledge that May can only become even more loathed, especially after the EU use her political weakness to extort yet more concessions. This should become clear after the Summer Recess (24th July - 4th September).
The second reason is that the UK could well be forced into making a shitty deal with the EU anyway, and any new leader who takes over too soon would merely end up accepting a poisoned chalice.
May has already given away almost all of the UK's leverage and bargaining chips, without getting anything in return, and is now at the EU's mercy, of which it has none. The EU knows that a "no deal" could cause severe, short-term economic disruption in the UK, and that this could be politically very costly for the UK government. This gives them the whip hand. In order to avoid this, the UK government might decide to sign any kind of deal offered by the EU. The thinking here is that once Britain is outside the Union, the bad deal can be improved and amended in future negotiations.
The problem here is that normal Conservative voters, the majority of whom support a hard Brexit, would hate any deal like this, and would probably defect to UKIP or not bother voting in a subsequent general election. This would give Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party a chance of power. But this is where May regains some usefulness.
The plan here is for the Conservative Party to hold their noses and vote through a bad deal, but then to hang it around May's neck while deposing her. Then it is hoped a new leader, who has not been tarnished by the deal, can come in and win back the voters with some hard-Brexit, "amend the deal" rhetoric. In short, the plan is to use May as a political scapegoat to get over an extremely big bump in the road.
If this can be done effectively, it would give the Conservative Party a fighting chance at the next election, and return a Prime Minister with a stronger majority, committed, at least on the face of it, to "fine-tuning" a soft Brexit deal into a harder one.
The deadline for all these political shenanigans is April 2019.
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