Crace - Decline and fail: read in case of political apocalypse

Theresa May took office in July 2016 with one job and one job only. To deliver Brexit. But there was a problem with this. The two Leave campaigns had been very careful not to define exactly what Brexit meant in order to maximise their appeal. Some had voted to leave because they wanted less immigration, others had voted for the UK to regain its sovereignty from the EU. Some were openly relaxed about the UK remaining in the single market and the customs union, others demanded nothing less than a clean break from all EU institutions.

So there was no clear roadmap to Brexit and it was up to May, whom many commentators had confidently declared to be a safe pair of hands, a competent bureaucrat, to set her own vision. Which she did by repeatedly stating that Brexit meant Brexit. At first this was received as some kind of mystic vision, loaded with wisdom, but it wasnt long before many people began to wonder if there was less to May than met the eye. And when she started uttering sentences, such as I am determined to deliver on the things which I am determined to deliver, her characterisation as the Maybot was born.

By January 2017, many of the Brexiteers in the Conservative party were beginning to get decidedly twitchy. It was seven months since the referendum and the UK had made no real moves to leave the EU. Nor was it at all clear on what terms we would be leaving. Not least because the EU had itself refused to enter any discussions with the UK on the divorce settlement and any future trade agreement until after Article 50 was triggered. So eventually, Theresa May was forced to jump. Having decided that alienating the hardline Eurosceptic MPs of the European Research Group risked splitting the Tory party on balance, she rightly considered her Remainer-leaning MPs to be more amenable and pliable she delivered a speech at Lancaster House that spelled out what Brexit actually meant. No membership of the single market or a customs union and no jurisdiction by the European Court of Justice. A hard Brexit.

Parliament voted to trigger Article 50 on March 29th. The die had been cast. The UK had laid out its Brexit objectives and had set in motion the two-year time limit in which to achieve it. This was the high point of the May administration and she was widely praised by many sections of the media as the prime minister who had stood up to Europe and delivered on the result of the referendum. This period of grace lasted only a matter of weeks.

In the first nine months of her premiership, May had been explicitly asked seven times on national television whether she would be calling a general election. On eachoccasion she had said no, insisting it wouldnt be in the national interest. After a brief walking holiday in Wales, she returned to Downing Street after the Easter break and promptly declared a general election. The calculation was quite straightforward. The Conservatives were about 20 points ahead of Labour in the opinion polls and on course for a majority of between 80 and 100 seats. Enough for her to wipe out the opposition for a generation and to force any deal through parliament without having to worry about the Brexit hardliners in her own party.

Where the strategy fell apart was in the execution. First her advisers encouraged her to run a presidential-style campaign. Not the most obvious choice for a prime minister with little charisma or personality who had made plain she intended to avoid all TV debates. Then May was forced to disown her own manifesto after her dementia tax was universally panned. With the prime minister in full meltdown even the right-wing press were now calling her the Maybot unable to do more than repeat Strong and Stable and Nothing has Changed while looking perpetually startled, and with Jeremy Corbyn campaigning rather more passionately than he had in the referendum, the polls began to narrow.

Even so, it was a major shock not just to the Conservatives, but also to Labour when the result of the June general election was declared and May had lost her overall majority. If the election had been a proxy vote on Brexit, then the country was every bit as dividedas it had been the year before. The prime minister had gambled and lost. She returned to Downing Street with her position far weaker than before and relying on the votes thanks to a 1 billion bung on the 10 MPs of the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party.

From then on, May was firmly on the back foot. She retired to lick her wounds over the summer and her attempt to reassert her authority over her party with the party conference speech in the autumn ended in excruciating embarrassment. First a protestor presented her with a P45. Then she lost her voice. Then parts of the scenery collapsed around her. Mays world was literally collapsing around her.

Meanwhile the EU looked on in amazement. There had always been a very good reason why the EU had made Article 50 a two-year process. Because it had imagined most countries would conclude it was an impossibly short time in which to agree a settlement and therefore not worth doing. Predictably the EU chose to make the process as difficult as possible by insisting that it would refuse to discuss the future trading relationships before citizens rights, the divorce bill and the Irish border had been agreed. Something to which the UK had little choice other than to agree.

If things were going badly in Brussels citizens rights and a 39 billion divorce bill were eventually agreed, but Ireland proved a whole lot trickier as the DUP were unwilling to sign off anything that treated NorthernIreland differently to the rest of the UK they were also crumbling back in the UK. David Davis, the Brexit secretary, had claimed his department had produced 57 sectoral assessments analysing Brexits potential impact in excruciating detail, but when parliament called his bluff and demanded to see them, they showed that the UK was hopelessly underprepared.

The government was also falling apart, with three ministers being forced to resign. Michael Fallon and Damian Green for allegations of sexual misconduct and Priti Patel for lying about conducting her own unofficial foreign policy. With just a year left on the clock until the UK was to leave the EU, Mays grasp on power was looking increasingly tenuous and the country was no clearer on just what Brexit would really mean.