(Times Paywall) It’s make-believe to think May can survive
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/it-s-make-believe-to-think-may-can-survive-vlpkgldg3
" After a catastrophic general election in which the prime minister has lost her parliamentary majority, she emerges from Buckingham Palace to announce the formation of a new government as if the news needed no more explanation than a hair appointment.
The prime minister’s statement outside Downing Street comes close to inviting not political analysis but psychoanalysis."
Here are the facts.
Egged on by many voices around her, Theresa May miscalculated badly in calling an election.
She then mismanaged the conduct of the election.
She has lost public trust and lost her authority to govern.
In its merciless and underhand way, the incoming parliamentary Conservative Party will soon be making that clear to her.
That’s what chief whips and 1922 Committee meetings are for.
"There has to be a government, however, so it should prove possible for Mrs May to run a caretaker minority administration before making way for her successor.
Were she to acknowledge all this before rather than after she is forced to, she would earn sympathy, time and a fair wind.
She has a matter of days in which to pre-empt her executioners."
"The Conservative Party has just taken a kicking from an electorate still trying to din into the Tory head
— as they have at every election since, in circumstances of civil chaos in 1979, they held their noses and voted for Margaret Thatcher —
that ours is a mostly modern-thinking, moderate and outward-looking nation with
a reflexive distaste for the Tory right.
Hence Ruth Davidson’s success in Scotland."
"Let us take the Tory right at their word.
They said this election was about Brexit.
They said it offered the electorate a chance to show the world we backed our prime minister’s plans for a hard version of Brexit, and to make no compromises on immigration and the European Court of Justice.
They said that victory on June 8 would be the vindication of a rougher-edged, more populist model of Conservatism than the soppy and limp-wristed model Cameroons had tried to build."
" If the widely expected Tory landslide had actually occurred on Thursday, we know very well what they would be saying now.
That the people had spoken.
That Britain had backed a hard Brexit, a no-deal-is-better-than-a-bad-deal Brexit, a Blighty-alone Brexit, a come-what-may, do-your-worst-Jean-Claude, up-yours-Delors Brexit.
Within minutes of an exit poll prediction of a big majority, Tory hardliners and Brexiteers would have been queueing to take ownership of that victory.
So let them now take ownership of the defeat."
"Let the remnants of Ukip’s bedraggled army sit down and weep by the banks of the Rother and Don.
And let the sane centrists, the internationalists, the gently-does-it realists, the politicians who know that business and the City matter, the parliamentarians who — did they but know it — will form a convincing majority of the new Tory party at Westminster, take heart.
They need to find each other and find their collective voice now before the right, and Europhobes and their opportunist hitchhikers like Boris Johnson mobilise.
This could prove an auspicious season for Tory progressives."
"It’s a moment to seize for moderation but time is short.
There must surely be a leadership election later this year
and if centrists skulk
there’s a Conservative dynamic that will turn the contest into a posturing auction between right-of-centre candidates for backbench and grassroots support.
Within a few weeks they’ll all have forgotten what Thursday reminded them of:
that there’s an electorate out there.