Theresa May has become the latest Conservative MP to announce they don’t intend to stand for parliament again at the next election. This has had something of a mixed reception, with some like Rory Stewart and her former chief of staff Gavin (Lord) Barwell regretting she is leaving and thinking she was dedicated and hard-working, while others like Femi Oluwole who think she tore the fabric of British society apart. The two things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive of course.
Here's Stewart:
Very sorry that @theresa_may is standing down - I was and remain a huge admirer - she represents important principles and dignity - which have shone through her last five years as a backbencher. A real loss to parliament.
— Rory Stewart (@RoryStewartUK) March 8, 2024
And Barwell is here:
Very sorry to hear this - both her constituents and the House of Commons will miss her. I hope future PMs will follow her example of remaining as an MP after they leave Number 10 - she has made a number of important contributions over the last five yearshttps://t.co/cF6rxRpm8V
— Gavin Barwell (@GavinBarwell) March 8, 2024
Daniel Finkelstein in The Times praises her for being diligent and on top of the detail, something her tormentor and successor never mastered as we know to our cost.
Robert Colville, also in The Times, and referring to Brexit, says "Perhaps it’s wrong to blame May for the years of bitterness that followed, as British politics slowly tore itself into two intractable camps. But she definitely didn’t help. By the end of her tenure, not only was Brexit unresolved, but the polarisation between Leave and Remain had become the central fact of politics — and it remains hugely important today."
Femi takes aim at her for what is often seen as the crucial decision to leave not just the political institutions of the EU but also the customs union and the single market. He blames her for pushing "for a version of Brexit she knew the public didn’t want, after spending months warning that Brexit would make us poorer."
Looking back with hindsight, I think she and her advisers Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill probably made the right decision for the wrong reasons.
Consider the counterfactual. What if she had played the stateswoman and aimed for a soft Brexit, with the UK remaining in the SM and the CU? The economic damage would have been reduced for sure, if not avoided altogether, but UK businesses, particularly financial services, would be complaining about having almost zero influence over rule-making in Brussels. Brexiteers would be hopping mad and the whole European debate would certainly have continued unabated.
If we assume the COVID pandemic would still have happened, with the huge financial cost to taxpayers, you can be sure Brexiteers would have weaponised that and probably to their advantage. It doesn't take a genius to see plenty of opportunities to attack Brussels bureaucrats for the speed of the response and the astronomical costs involved.
There would have been an economic downturn in any event, not as severe perhaps but a downturn nonetheless. Farage, Gove, and Johnson would have been shouting how they and Britain would have done so much better without the 'dead hand' of Brussels to hold us all back.
I don't need to paint a picture and I've made the same or a similar argument before about the second referendum. I marched on several occasions to try and get one. Had we done so and lost - it was always a possibility - I think we would have been out of the EU for decades.
The soft Brexit option that Femi and others wanted would simply have allowed the issue to fester for several more years with Farage and his crew in the European parliament trashing Britain's reputation while the right-wing press continued with its long-standing anti-EU agenda and Euro-myth stories about curved bananas and unrecyclable tea bags. The whole thing would have been turbo-charged.
No, I think the nails started to be driven into Brexit's coffin in late 2016 at the Tory Party conference when Mrs May first announced the hard Brexit that we later got under Boris Johnson. Brexit's fate was settled at that time.
The referendum decision was a big mistake, I have no doubt about it, but it was always going to be corrected much quicker by a clear, unequivocal demonstration that our problems were never made in Brussels and that Brexit, far from solving anything has made everything more difficult, slower and at higher costs. There are no Brexit dividends as is becoming clearer by the week.
No, the quickest route back to the EU was to leave it completely and show the damage that Brexit has caused. Yes, it's been painful and the costs will continue to stack up until we rejoin, but I would argue a hard Brexit was and still is the quickest and cheapest route to rejoining.
