And now the result of the You Gov jury. The question was this: which of the following do you think would make the best Prime Minister?
- Don’t know – 38%
- Theresa May – 36%
- Jeremy Corbyn – 22%
People are quick to slag off the British public but they are surely onto something here. British politics is a sea of mediocrity.
I’m in the non existent category ‘None of the above’. I can’t be considered a ‘don’t know’ because I do know that both May and Corbyn are woefully inadequate politicians, arguably the worst PM and leader of the opposition at the worst possible time for the country.
It is said that oppositions don’t win elections; governments lose them. It’s an arguable point of view but there is some truth in it. Yet, all the rules are going out of the window at the moment.
The Conservative Party is divided like never before in my lifetime, maybe more so than in its entire history. I cannot help but thinking that a half-decent Labour leader would have taken his or her party miles ahead in the polls. But we haven’t got a half-decent Labour leader: we’ve got a terrible one, a career backbencher who has never had an original idea in his life. Jeremy Corbyn, for all his bizarre cult following, is the greatest asset Theresa May could wish for.
Theresa May showed just how bad she was in the 2017 election campaign when she threw away her majority in the House of Commons by running the worst campaign in British political history. Like Corbyn, she is managed by her minders and kept away from major TV interviewers like Andrew Neil and given sofa space on the wretched Andrew Marr show or light-entertainment fluff like the One Show. All this would be funny if it wasn’t so serious.
It is entirely possible that within weeks, Theresa May will have been removed from office by her own party. Having made a complete mess of Brexit to the extent that her government still doesn’t have an effective position on many of the major issues, her plan made at Chequers is about to be rejected by all sides of her party. And quite right too. May is putting forward a deal which makes things far worse than they are now within the EU, with the UK becoming rule-takers rather than the rule-makers we are today.
If you think the current Brexit negotiations are the end of Brexit and we can all move on, forget it. This is just the withdrawal agreement. Our departure from the EU will dominate our politics for years, probably decades, to come and all that our negotiators will be trying to do is replicate the agreements we already have. It’s madness.
A no deal would be a calamity. Even the lying Brexiteers know that chaos will ensue if we crash out without a deal. All the doom-mongers will be proved right when food and medicine shortages kick in, when planes stop flying, when border checks are imposed. Britain will grind to a standstill. There are people who are prepared to accept the hardest Brexit of all: the hardline extremists from the likes of Johnson and Farage on one side and Corbyn and McDonnell on the other.
When May’s deal is sunk by the House of Commons which will certainly reject a no deal Brexit, what happens then? The politicians, who got us into this mess in the first place – don’t forget that Labour voted through the referendum bill, too – have no way of getting us out of it. There is only one way forward: a second referendum.
I have changed my mind on this after a great deal of thought because I now see no alternative. There is no deal available that will attract a parliamentary majority. Of course, we respect the 2016 vote to a point, bearing in mind the crooked campaign run by the Tory hard right alongside the likes of Farage and supported – who knows how? – by the likes of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. However, if the country is not allowed the opportunity to change its mind, it ceases to be a democracy. Arch leaver David Davis said that, one of the few things he has ever been right about.
So, my lifelong opposition to referendums ends for this one vote and there must be three options for the British people:
- Vote for Theresa May’s Chequers deal
- Vote for no deal
- Vote to remain in the EU
I advocate this option with no confidence that remain would win. Precious few leavers have changed their minds since the referendum and I doubt that the campaign would be any different. Remain would not be led by anyone from the top table in the government and only half-heartedly by the Labour front bench. May, half her parliamentary party and some Labour MPs would support Chequers. And the hardliners like Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson and David Davis would seek to throw us off a cliff with no deal.
The campaign for the first referendum was a joke. Remain, complacently led by David Cameron and George Osborne, ran a campaign many called Project Fear. It focused on how bad things would be under Brexit and not how the EU had been so positive for Britain through four decades. The leave campaign was also predicated on fear and, even worse, outright lies. Do people really think Boris Johnson would suddenly become an honest and decent man in a second referendum? Hardly.
And if May falls soon, Johnson will be among the main leadership candidates, our next Prime Minister. Imagine a choice between Johnson and Corbyn for Number 10. If you thought May and Corbyn was as bad as it gets, this could be even worse.
The current default position of the British people is “don’t know”. Plenty of them probably do know that both May and Corbyn are hopeless and they don’t know where to turn. At a time of great uncertainty around the world, turning away from our closest allies would be madness. With the politicians unable to decide, it must be left to the people to sort out the mess or, as some of us fear, make things even worse.
