Is this the end of May?

With support for "Theresa May's Team" collapsing in the polls, the word hubris comes to mind:  “Excessive pride towards or defiance of the gods, leading to nemesis (the inescapable agent of someone's or something's downfall).” 

It is worth noting at this point that there was absolutely no need to call an election.  Between 1992 and 1997 John Major managed to run his government on a majority just half as big as Theresa May’s, in the face of a resurgent New labour, and despite his party being divided over Europe.  May, in contrast, could have continued unencumbered by a parliamentary Labour party more concerned with conspiring against its leader than with opposing the government.  Moreover, with the Brexit referendum done and dusted any Tory backbench opposition over Europe could be easily fended off.

What of those crucial Brexit negotiations that May claims the election is all about?  If the Brexit negotiations are as crucial as May says, why on earth are we spending the best part of two months out of the 24 month negotiating window to fight a general election?  More practically, since the election is limited to around 40 million UK voters, how deluded is May to think that the result will cut any ice with EU negotiators who represent close to 500 million people?  The truth is that the size of the government's majority will have no bearing whatsoever on the Brexit negotiations.

The reality is that this election is all about power.  Having carried out a palace coup last year, when she sacked all of Cameron and Osborne’s special advisors, and having confined the remaining pro-Cameron Tories to the back benches, May was still saddled with the 2015 manifesto – which backfired spectacularly in March when her chancellor was forced to U-turn on plans to raise taxes for the self-employed.  The more personal reason for the election is May’s darkly Machiavellian personality and her need to quell the perceived ranks of knife-wielding Tory backbenchers waiting for an opportunity for vengeance.  As one Tory supporter in a now deleted Telegraph article put it:

“Theresa May is to Westminster what Cersei Lannister is to Westeros in Game of Thrones: no one who challenges her survives undamaged, while the welfare of the realm is of secondary concern.”

This election – which May herself ruled out time and again – is personal.  Indeed, May has made no secret of that fact.  The campaign literature, the social media advertising and even the campaign bus are all about “Theresa May’s team.”  Any foreign visitor to these shores would struggle to discover that the Conservative and Unionist Party had anything to do with it.

The timing of the election is opportunist too.  It is rumoured – and I have no reason to doubt this – that an unexpected by-election win in Labour’s Middlesbrough heartland prompted the decision to go to the country.  The result appeared to confirm what the opinion polls were saying – that under Jeremy Corbyn, Labour looked like losing its Welsh and Northern English heartlands.  With the Tories more than 20 percent ahead of Labour in the polls, there would never be a more opportune moment to call an election.

From the outset, however, things began to backfire.  Two of May’s communications team resigned immediately after the election was called, citing differences with May’s unofficial Deputy Prime Ministers - Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy.  These are the unelected guards at May’s keep, preventing any and all bad news from reaching the delicate ears of their revered leader.  Even cabinet ministers are unable to get past Hill and Timothy unless May has actually summoned them.  Messengers bearing bad tidings are simply turned away.

One such messenger was psephologist Professor John Curtice from Strathclyde University.  Curtice cautioned against taking for granted that a high poll lead would translate into a big majority:

“An awful lot of Labour seats are astonishingly safe and therefore even with a 15-point lead, well yes I think Theresa May at that point will get past the 100 majority mark.

“But let’s just imagine that the lead falls back to seven, back in 2015, a seven-point lead over Labour was only enough to get a majority of 12 and that was only achieved by winning a lot of seats off the Liberal Democrats.”

Whether this message got through to May is questionable.  This is because, in addition to the handful of loyal courtiers who stand between May and the outside world, the Tories have successfully created an outer wall of media mirrors to reflect back the glory of the great leader.  By packing the once respected (and increasingly despised) BBC with Tory insiders like Tony Hall, Nick Robinson and Laura Kuenssberg, the Tory party ensured that Jeremy Corbyn would never get a fair hearing.  The flip side of this particular coin, however, was that Theresa May and her “team” no longer faced anyone brave enough to tell the truth to power.

What happened next will have been as surprising to Labour supporters as it was shocking to the Tories.  Labour had a manifesto!  One of the benefits of calling an early election is precisely that it catches the opposition parties unaware.  They are forced to cobble together in just days a policy platform that they would have expected to carefully craft over three years.

Not only did Labour have a manifesto, their communications team – who have been widely criticised for not being media savvy – understood the huge gains that could be made by “leaking” the manifesto to the media ahead of its official launch.  The media played their part brilliantly simply by unconsciously sticking to the narrative that Labour’s manifesto was going to be a repeat of the 1983 suicide note.  Before they knew it, the media were highlighting popular policies like renationalising the railways, energy and water infrastructure and properly funding police, schools and the NHS.

The Tory manifesto turned out to be exactly the one that their strategists had expected Labour to produce.  Ill-thought through, lacking detail and un-costed, May’s manifesto looked like it had been scribbled on the back of a sheet of A4 on the way to the launch.  As Fraser Nelson in the pro-Tory Spectator lamented:

“Not since Labour’s 1983 ‘Suicide note’ has a manifesto launch done so much to cheer the other side. I’m not sure quite what the thinking was behind those fervent disavowals of right-wing politics and the embrace of bad Labour ideas, but if the aim was to lure Labour voters then it doesn’t seem to have been a great success.”

Within days of the manifesto launch, Labour had closed the gap with the Tories.  One YouGov poll put May’s lead at just 5 percent.  However, all of the polls followed the same trend, showing the gap between the parties narrowing.  Baring a miracle, May’s dream of 100 or more new Tory MPs all owing their position (and thus their loyalty) to her looks to be over.  On a five percent lead, May would be lucky to keep the majority she has.

The news today – ironically the last day of May – is that a YouGov poll predicts that Britain will vote for another hung parliament with the Tories emerging as the largest party, but unable to form a government.  Were this to be the case eight days from now, Theresa May can look forward to another long walking holiday in the Welsh hills.  Because the only way that she can remain as Prime Minister is to win a majority.  This is simply because the arithmetic doesn’t work for the Tories.  The SNP are expected to hang onto 50 of the 54 seats they won in 2015.  Short of Theresa May offering Scottish independence in a coalition deal, they will not go near a Tory party that is toxic north of the border.  The LibDems are expected to get ten seats (up from 9); not enough to form another coalition with the Tories even if their remaining MPs were foolish enough to repeat their 2010 mistake.

The alternative of some kind of “rainbow coalition” involving some or all of the nationalists, greens, LibDems and Labour is as implausible.  If today’s poll were to be correct, such a coalition would still fall 5 seats short of a majority.  Even if the polls continue to move in favour of Labour, it is impossible to see how a pro-leave Corbyn leadership can be reconciled with the passionately pro-Remain LibDems and nationalist parties.

Of course, with a week to go, and given the unreliability of previous polls, the election could still go either way.  But if you wanted to place a ten pound bet at very good odds on an outcome that we have not seen since the 1930s, you might want to consider the possibility of some kind of national government.  This would occur simply because once it becomes clear that neither May nor Corbyn can command the majority in parliament, the only three options remaining would be:

• to follow the Belgian example of not having a government for the foreseeable future;  
• to inflict yet another unwanted general election of the British people; 
• or do what many councils across Britain do when the votes work against them, and form a coalition out of the two largest parties.

In the face of the ticking Brexit clock, only the last of these is acceptable.  Moreover, whatever else may be happening in Britain, inside the Westminster Bubble, large numbers of Tory and Labour MPs have more in common with one another than with their respective leaders.  With this in mind, in the event of a hung parliament, I wouldn’t rule out a centrist coalition put together with the explicit aim of seeing the country through the Brexit emergency.

A weak and insecure woman

There are many facets of yesterday’s hack of the NHS computer systems that can be laid squarely at the government’s door.  Most obviously, the discovery that among the “inefficient back office functions” that Jeremy Hunt had happily taken the axe to was the small matter of keeping the NHS computer security up to date.  As the BBC reported:

“Up to 90% of NHS hospitals are still using the Windows XP programme, with experts suggesting that the 2001 operating system has made the NHS vulnerable to cyber-attacks.”

Perhaps less obviously, it is now clear that the malware that shut down the NHS systems was created by the security services.   The development of these tools – and the risk that they would fall into the hands of criminals – was a key reason that Sir Tim Berners-Lee (and many others) warned Theresa May that her Snoopers Charter would lead to exactly the kind of events that unfolded yesterday:

“This snoopers charter has no place in a modern democracy - it undermines our fundamental rights online. The bulk collection of everyone's internet browsing data is disproportionate, creates a security nightmare for the ISPs who must store the data - and rides roughshod over our right to privacy. Meanwhile, the bulk hacking powers in the Bill risk making the internet less safe for everyone.” (My emphasis)

On these two grounds alone, the government must be held to account.  There is, however, another facet of yesterday’s events that is far more worrying than a serious but transitory computer hack.  This is the haste with which Prime Minister Theresa May abandoned the campaign trail in order to “take control” of the unfolding situation.

I had studied this behaviour before, but in a different context.  It reminded me of the antics of General Neil Richie, the dangerously incompetent commander of the British Eighth Army in North Africa whose attention to detail and constant interference in the work of his subordinates led to the piecemeal destruction of his army, the fall of Tobruk, and, were it not for the last ditch actions of Auchinleck to hold the Germans at El Alamein, might well have cost Britain the second world war.  Too much attention to detail and too much interference with one’s subordinates turn out to be common traits that define incompetent leaders.  According to General Messervy (quoted in Norman Dixon’s On the Psychology of Military Incompetence):

“Richie was all haywire by then.  All for counter-attacking in this direction one day and another the next.  Optimistic and trying not to believe that we had taken a knock.  When I reported the state of 1^st Armoured Division to him at a time when I was planning to use it for counter-attack, he flew to see me and almost took the view that I was being subversive...

 “Confident and decisive in his speech, but one did not always feel he was quite so confident and decisive in his own mind.”

Dixon suggests that the drive to leadership that produces both successful and incompetent leaders is a matter of motivation.  The first are those who seek success, the second are those attempting to avoid failure:

“Although these two sorts of achievement-motive may bring about rapid, even spectacular, promotion, their nature and effects are very different.  The first is healthy and mature, and brings to the fore those skills required by the job in hand; the second is pathological, immature, and developing of traits, such as dishonesty and expediency, which may run counter to those required of high command.”

The comparison of military leadership (and competence) with government is apt.  Not least because in Brexit the UK undoubtedly faces its worst crisis since the end of world war two.  Get it wrong and the consequences could be truly devastating .  So we need to be sure that the leader we choose to lead the negotiations is up to the job.

There is good reason to believe that May is not the strong and stable leader we need.  She has surrounded herself with incompetent ministers – not only her useless Health Secretary but also a Justice Secretary who fails to uphold justice and a Foreign Secretary who is so dangerous that he is apparently locked in a cupboard somewhere in the middle of the Gobi Desert where there is no chance of his getting in front of a camera or microphone until the election is over.  If May is the strong and stable leader she claims to be, how is it that these buffoons are still in her cabinet?  And if they are not buffoons, why is it that May interferes in their work and refuses to let them out on the campaign trail?

Nor is it only her dealings with cabinet colleagues that suggests that May is not the strong and stable character that she claims.  She has form when it comes to her staff too.  Back in February Mrs May effectively fired the esteemed Sir Mark Lyall Grant for what the media chose to refer to as “mansplaining” but might more accurately have been a senior civil servant patiently explaining why Mrs May could not have her own way.  If this were an isolated case, we might give Mrs May the benefit of the doubt.  But far from a one off, it is beginning to look like May’s modus operandi.  At the start of the election campaign, Mrs May lost both her Press Secretary and her Director of Communications:

“Both Ms Perrior and Ms Loudon had experienced frustration in accessing key meetings and information in Downing Street since their appointments last July.”

These resignations give us some indication of what Kenneth Clarke meant when he referred to May as a “bloody difficult woman.”

The very decision to call a snap election at the start of a brief 24 month window in which the UK’s exit from the EU has to be negotiated smacks of incompetent leadership.  If May truly was strong and stable, she would be overseeing her ministers and senior civil servants as they negotiated Britain's exit from the EU.  Instead she is on a bus that makes clear the election is all about her fragile ego (no obvious mention of the Tory party). 

The risk is that she will do to the Brexit negotiating team what she has previously done to her own staff, and what she did to the hapless Hunt in the face of what turned out to be a fairly ordinary malware fraud.  That is, like General Richie in the North African desert, she will interfere and flip-flop to such an extent that her negotiating team is paralysed in the face of an EU team that simply cannot afford to let the UK leave the EU with a good deal.

If the polls are correct, then Mrs May will be back in Downing Street on 9 June.  If so, I fear that a weak and insecure woman who is motivated more by fear of failure than any true desire for her country's success is about to deliver the worst possible Brexit – the one the EU bureaucrats on the opposite side of the table want; the one that punishes Britain as an example to any other member state that contemplates leaving.