Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O’Flynn

Is Theresa May in any position to criticise the PM?

When Theresa May told a joke at her own expense at a reception of Tory MPs held to celebrate Boris Johnson’s landslide election victory in December 2019, the assembled audience breathed a sigh of relief.

Many had expected the freshly re-elected May to be a thorn in the side of her successor during the ensuing parliamentary term. But her deferential joke, about her own botched 2017 election campaign, seemed to amount to an acknowledgment of the superior appeal of Boris Johnson.

In fact, the pessimists were right first time, and this has been underlined by May’s extraordinary speech about Afghanistan in the Commons this week.

Almost everything she said appeared designed to cast the Prime Minister in a negative light. She reminded MPs that Johnson had said in July that he did not think the Taliban would be able to take control of the country, before adding icily:

‘Was our intelligence really so poor? Was our understanding of the Afghan government so weak? Was our knowledge of the position on the ground so inadequate? Did we really believe that, or did we just feel that we had to follow the United States and hope that, on a wing and a prayer, it would be all right on the night?’

In fact, it is May who should have been feeling sheepish during the Afghanistan debate

As most of the assembled MPs will have realised, ‘our’ and ‘we’ meant Boris Johnson. Phrases such as ‘a wing and a prayer’ and ‘all right on the night’ played into the view of him as a bluffer and a seat-of-his-pants spiv – the kind of person who would not even bother to read his intelligence briefings.

And when John Redwood asked her, not unreasonably, to agree that President Biden deciding unilaterally to withdraw was at the heart of the mess, she wouldn’t even concede that, instead replying: ‘It was a unilateral decision of President Trump to do a deal with the Taliban that led to this withdrawal.

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