May’s head on the block

Understand what this government is trying to get away with, and think about how it is trying to get away with it, and you will see it is reconstituting the oldest and dirtiest alliance in Tory-history: the alliance between snobs and mobs.

I accept it takes a while to see our new rulers for what they are. Theresa May represents the dormitory town of Maidenhead. Although Eton College is just a few miles down the Thames valley, she could not be further socially and intellectually from David Cameron’s public school chumocracy. As for inciting mobs, what more ridiculous charge could I level against her? May seems to have no need to incite anyone. The far left has destroyed the opposition so thoroughly it will take Labour a generation to recover. A Conservative party that officially wanted to keep us in the European Union, then lost the referendum and its prime minister and chancellor, is nevertheless so far ahead in the polls it would win a landslide if there were an election tomorrow.

For all her apparent dominance, May’s cynicism and folly is forcing her to turn-brutish. She is going for a hard Brexit, which the majority of the Commons does not support, whose consequences were not spelt out to the British people, and which May, her Home Secretary Amber Rudd and Chancellor Philip Hammond do not — if we take at face value their public pronouncements during the referendum campaign — believe in.

The referendum mandated the government to take Britain out of the EU. That was all. Voters did not say and were not asked whether we wanted to stay in the single-market or customs union. We did not say and were not asked whether EU citizens should be left in fear of being wrenched from their jobs and, in many cases, their new families.