Six mistakes that doomed Theresa May's premiership

It has been the longest goodbye in British political history, but Theresa May is finally on the way out. After it emerged that the Prime Minister had “barricaded” herself into Number 10 yesterday afternoon, refusing to see either the Home Secretary or the Foreign Secretary, it was clear to all that the game was up.

The first to desert the sinking ship was her old rival, Andrea Leadsom, who resigned as Leader of the House last night. Today’s European election provides a brief respite, thanks to reporting restrictions on broadcasters. But unless Mrs May commits herself to a departure date tomorrow, she is likely to be told that Jeremy Hunt and Sajid Javid, with the tacit support of most of their Cabinet colleagues, are also ready to go.

In that worst case scenario, Mrs May might not even be allowed to remain as a caretaker, enabling her to surpass Gordon Brown’s tenure in office next Wednesday, for the duration of the leadership election. There is always David Lidington, her indispensable deputy, to perform that role.

Given that the only certainty is that she will go, sooner rather than later, the question inevitably arises: how did it all go wrong? What were the fatal mistakes that doomed the May premiership? In a crowded field, here are six that stand out.

1. Theresa May never quite lived down her jibe that the Conservatives were “the nasty party”. Unlike Mrs Thatcher, with whom she was initially compared, she never made MPs or members feel that she loved them, warts and all — and they never really warmed to her. That was fine when she was riding high in the polls, but when she lost her parliamentary majority she could not mobilise the Tories’ secret weapon: loyalty. No Conservative leader, not even the unclubbable Ted Heath or the ineffectual John Major, has ever been shown such disrespect, bordering on contempt, by her party.
2. She failed to carry out her promise, made on the steps of Downing Street as she took office, to reunite the country after the referendum. Her 2016 conference speech, implying that Remainers might be unpatriotic (“citizens of nowhere”), was all the more damaging because she was herself one of them. It did not help that Jeremy Corbyn had polarised politics, but she missed her chance to seize the moral high ground.
3. The disastrous decision to call an early election in 2017 — which seems to have unnerved the only man she really trusted, her husband Philip — was bound to expose the fact that she was never a conviction politician. More unexpected was her failure as a pragmatist. It never occurred to her that the “dementia tax” would be seen as a raid on homeowners who had worked hard, paid their taxes and saved for retirement — in other words, natural Tory voters.
4. Not only did Mrs May lack magnanimity in victory — she also floundered in defeat. She grasped the importance of consolidating Brexiteer support with slogans such as “Brexit means Brexit” and “No deal is better than a bad deal”. But she never believed that Brexit could deliver prosperity, believing as she did that it was all about immigration. Hence she missed the opportunity to seal a free trade deal with the EU when it was (briefly) on offer. Instead, she ended up haggling with Corbyn about a customs union — which defeated the whole object of Brexit.
5. Despite her dependence on the DUP, Mrs May never bothered to understand the Irish problem. She blithely signed up to the backstop, before it dawned on her that no deal which included it would ever muster a majority in a hung Parliament. By then it was too late. The EU had aligned itself with an Irish Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, who may have supposed that he could detach Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK as the price of Brexit. Officials in Brussels who wanted to punish the British may have thought so too. They were wrong: the DUP would rather scupper the Tories and Brexit than sign its own death warrant by agreeing to the backstop.
6. Mrs May’s lack of empathy became apparent to everyone after her mishandling of the Grenfell fire — everyone, that is, except the Prime Minister herself. She has persisted in believing that she alone can deliver Brexit, by sheer force of personality. Yet her powers of persuasion, at best limited, have been vitiated throughout by an almost pathological absence of emotional intelligence. Her inability to master the art of the deal, her utter failure either to inspire affection or evoke awe among colleagues, her risible attempts to appeal to the public over the heads of her party: all these character flaws have come to a head in the multiple humiliations of this week.

Mrs May had hoped that Brexit would be the prelude to her own exit, at a time of her choosing. Instead, a lifetime of public service, in which she undoubtedly takes pride, looks certain to be requited with a brutal defenestration that she does not deserve.

Yet her one unquestionable quality — persistence — has proved to be her downfall. One definition of insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting a different result. Another is to stake your whole reputation on one task and then not only fail to carry it out, but deny responsibility. Persistence in denial is no virtue — least of all in a Prime Minister whose boast was: “My whole philosophy is about doing, not talking.”