Sometimes I think half of the upper echelons of the Tory party should be sectioned for their own and our safety. This applies in spades to Iain Duncan Smith. He is calling on Theresa May to go or at least set the date (HERE). The ERG attempted to remove the PM last year and failed. According to the rules they cannot mount another challenge for twelve months. These rules were created in 1998 under Hague and I assume this 12 month period was intended to prevent IDS doing what he is now doing, which is to continually call for the leader's head.
The EU must be mystified at the antics of the ERG inside the Tory party. The whole of Europe is transfixed by what a small group of determined cranks are doing to a mature western liberal democracy.
IDS of course has experience of no-confidence votes, having lost one himself in October 2003 by 15 votes. This was when the entire Conservative parliamentary party could fit in a telephone box - (happy days when I think about it now). He insisted at the time that he had, "the confidence of the grass roots" and therein lies the problem. He almost certainly still has the confidence of ordinary members - most of whom are politically to the right of Attila the Hun. If they had their way we would be hanging criminals left, right and centre, building huge coal fired power stations, fitting 200 watt filament bulbs everywhere for both light and heat and breaking our backs dragging around vacuum cleaners made of cast iron and mahogany. For them the empire lives on, along with the smell of mothballs and flannel trousers.
But anyway, I digress. Back to the present. Let's think where we are.
The PM invoked Article 50 in March 2017 without any consultation with other parties or even with her own party. She didn't even consult the cabinet. She pretended to have a plan when there wasn't one or indeed any agreement inside the cabinet on how such a plan might be developed. Within days of the notification being dispatched to Brussels she called an election to strengthen her hand but succeeded only in losing the small majority she had.
It wasn't until a year or more into the negotiations in July 2018 that we reached a frail and shaky consensus in cabinet with the so-called Chequers agreement. Within hours her foreign minister and two Brexit ministers had resigned.
She almost concluded an agreement early last November until the DUP, with whom she had to get into bed to save her government, blocked it, even as her pen hovered over the page reserved for signatures. Dashing back for 'consultation' with her billion pound friends from Ulster, she finally got the draft deal agreed with the EU and published on 14th November. All 585 pages of it. And things have been going downhill ever since.
The ERG call a no-confidence vote in December which she survived. She has had three attempts at getting the withdrawal agreement ratified by parliament but is repelled every time. She has to ask Brussels for an extension and then beg for another, longer one. Nobody in Europe or Westminster believes a word she says any more.
In April, the men in grey suits from the 1922 committee had become so desperate to get rid of Theresa they looked at changing the 12 month rule so they could have votes of confidence every afternoon if they chose to. That failed.
Now, following the disastrous local election results, IDS is calling for her to go now. Just go, please, please just GO! One can almost imagine him, his spirit completely broken, clutching his shiny head and sobbing his heart out for her to go.
But she wants to wait for the European elections. There is no humiliation she won't suffer - if indeed she still knows what it is - to get her deal through. She is indeed a bloody difficult woman.
Finally and quite bizarrely, the opinion poll published on Friday (HERE) for KIS Finance, carried out by YouGov on 23rd - 24th April with 1,787 adults (this is what it says?) gives the present state of public opinion in Britain as 61% wanting to remain in the EU and just 12% in favour of her deal.
Theresa May is prepared for the Tory party to die in a ditch, in order to force through a deal that the majority of people DO NOT WANT!
In January (HERE) I thought she would be crushed between the massively unequal and slowly grinding mill wheels of the EU and parliament - but now I think she might actually break both.
