There’s something rather magnificent about the way TMay just keeps keeps hanging in there
Whenever her detractors think she’s in a corner she always manages to play for time
So another day and another key confrontation for TMay over when she is going to finally step down as CON leader and Prime Minister. Like all others such key moments, it seems, she has found a way to get a key decision deferred till next week or the week after with the result that the pressure for now is offloaded. This is wonderful to watch.
Those Tory MPs who want her out, and it is said that the number is growing, must really be furious about the ERG attempt last December to force a vote of no confidence against her. She survived as we all know that means she has 12 months immunity from a further challenge. Now they are trying to change the rules.
Since the party conference last October I have lost count of the number of front pages of the Times, Sunday Times, the Sun, the Mail, the Telegraph and others that have warned of imminent doom for Mrs May. But it has never happened and even though she is pursuing a policy on Brexit which is alien to a large part of her party she is still there in control.
Looking back it all went wrong for CON MPs when she reported to the 1922 Committee on the Monday evening after she had lost the Tory majority on June 8th 2017. That was the moment, surely, when they should have been firm and got her out. As the former Chancellor, George Osborne, observed in the hours after the election result she was a dead woman walking. Well Theresa has proved him wrong many many times over.
She’s helped, of course, by a lack of unanimity within the party over who should be the successor and the warring factions between the different groupings of brexiteers who are not going to compromise.
I am one of many punters who has lost money betting that she’d be out early but I’m keeping out of the market now. Currently it’s 84% chance on Betfair that she’ll gothis year. I just wonder whether she might make it into 2020. Whatever her resilience is truly magnificent to behold.
Mike Smithson