How Brexit consumed a British Prime Minister

Prime Minister Theresa May was popular once. That may be hard to remember as she steps down in two weeks’ time, but it’s true. Just three years before her own political party forced her to step aside, she was hailed by politicians and citizens as the wisest choice to lead the UK’s separation from the European Union (EU).
Then came the reality of Brexit and the political stalemate she was unable to break. History will judge her by that failure, which has hardened national divisions and hollowed out the center of British politics. But it’s not fair to assess May’s legacy without separating the things she could control from the things that were out of her hands.
May wasn’t an obvious choice then, but she quickly became a popular one in the months after the referendum. In August, 2016, she was regarded favourably by 48% of all voters and unfavorably by 36%, opinion polls showed. In July that year, 52% of those asked said that May would make the best prime minister; only 18% said the same of opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
After the referendum, May spoke movingly to the whole country, but especially to the people whom she referred to as “just about managing.” By that she meant voters hard-hit by years of austerity and whiplashed by globalisation and the widening gap between their skills and the demands of the modern workplace. They put Brexit over the line and May saw it as her job as to listen to them.
May’s fall partly came because her strengths – determination, loyalty to her party, ability to resist pressure – were also weaknesses. The flip side of her steely resolve was intransigence. The flip side of her loyalty to party was an inability to make decisions that would be unpopular with a small but powerful part of it. The flip side of her sense of duty was an
allergy to compromise.
It didn’t help that May had few friends. She is a private person who relied on so small a group of advisers that, to some, only her husband Philip really knew where she stood. She seemed out of touch with the mood in her party and the public. Her cabinet members were so disloyal and mistrustful that discussions in meetings were leaked in gruesome detail.
May drew one overriding conclusion from the 2016 Brexit vote that fitted with her own experience as Home Secretary and had major consequences for what followed. The public, she felt, wanted government to assert control over Britain’s borders, which meant ending the UK’s membership of the EU single market, which guarantees the free movement of goods, services, capital and labor. Even as the country’s attitudes toward immigration softened, May doubled down, determined to take Britain out of the single market and to clampdown on migration by low-skilled workers.
May’s red lines — leaving the single market and leaving the customs union – decided before she understood the consequences and never redrawn, led her to make three promises that were both non-negotiable and collectively unattainable.
There is, of course, plenty of blame to go around. The previous Parliament voted 10-to-one to hold the 2016 referendum, and the present one voted overwhelmingly to trigger Article 50. The Labour Party had nothing useful to say about Brexit for most of the time it was being debated, because its own base was divided as was its leadership.
There were glimpses in the past three years of a Prime Minister May who might have been. Her early appeal to 48% that voted to Remain was one. There was also her 2018 party conference speech, in which she rejected populism of US President Donald Trump, decried the polarisation of politics, defended capitalism, and pitched for the center ground. And yet the unifying, centrist language remained rhetorical. She never followed through. Brexit consumed the oxygen available for other issues.
For all her undeniable resilience and determination, none of the goals she set for her premiership – delivering Brexit, tackling social injustices and strengthening the union with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – were delivered.
The question of where May went wrong is more than just academic. The Conservatives have torn themselves up over Europe for years. Conflict over the UK-EU relationship has ended the career of every leader since Thatcher left office in 1990. But the party has managed to be pragmatic in crisis and has found ways to keep deep ideological divisions from consuming it, so far. May’s term has made them worse.
A new election can’t be far off. And for all the drama of recent months, the most difficult negotiations over how Britain will leave the EU are only beginning. In the next two or more years, the UK will negotiate its future trading relationship with its closest neighbor, largest trading partner and historically. The Conservative Party doesn’t just need to decide who will lead it but, more importantly, what it stands for.

—Bloomberg

Therese Raphael writes editorials on European politics and economics for Bloomberg Opinion