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Tough week?
Maybe the kids were playing up, your chosen team spectacularly failed to achieve what you’d hoped, or you had problems at work.Theresa May’s Brexit-themed week from hell featured all of these. Those pesky children, Boris Johnson and David Davis, left home in a right old huff. Her team are in a constant state of flux and no nearer figuring out a Brexit deal with the EU, and describing her last seven days as “problematic” is like saying Gareth Southgate is OK-ish.
v DaDa and BoJo aren’t the only CabiTubbies to have quit this week, with Maria Caulfield and Ben Bradley both leaving their vice-chair roles in the Conservative party.
Mrs May, forced into a hasty reshuffle to fill the vacant cabinet seats, announced after her latest incarnation had met that she was “looking ahead to a busy week”. She might as well have added “and looking over my shoulder to see who’s going to stab me in the back next”.
With just over eight months until the UK leaves the European Union, there’s no deal agreed on how trade will work after the 29th of March 2019 deadline.
An agreement made by the beleaguered PM, last week, has been the catalyst for the big name departures. Davis said that the UK was “giving too much away, too easily” before jumping overboard, whilst Boris’s resignation letter stated that the Brexit “dream is dying, suffocated by needless self-doubt”.
Describing Brexit as a dream seems pretty extreme, but this was Boris – it’s possible his letter was written in crayon anyway.
So, is May maybe going to go too? With so much dissent and turmoil in the Party ranks, she does look increasingly vulnerable. But there is one simple question that’s tough to answer for any would-be leader thinking of mounting a challenge: Do I want to be the one burdened with getting Brexit sorted out with a deal that everybody is happy with?
It does feel like a Mission Impossible – the ultimate poisoned chalice. Become leader, have a go at sorting the mess out in time, and then immediately after, when everyone realises it’s still a dogs dinner and feels like they’ve been cheated in some way, get ousted by an ungrateful party/voters.
At which point, Boris will saunter back in with a promise of making everything lovely again. Even if he writes it on a big red bus, it’ll probably still work.
Merry Brexmess!
This post first appeared as my "A wry look at the week" column, in The Mail, on Friday 13th July 2018. It received a minor title edit in the print edition (dropping the 'little'), but made it through unscathed in the version on their website.
I usually avoid political columns where I can - largely out of pure laziness. It does require a bit of research to get some of the detail right, and there's always the risk that the story will change during the 2-day gap between submitting copy and it appearing in the paper.
Got away with it this time, and I was pretty happy with this one... especially the "CabiTubbies" bit.
(CS A-Z: "Now Xmas". Stop judging me.)
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