The road not taken | 19 July 2018

Handling Brexit was never going to be easy for Theresa May, given that the Tories have been fighting a civil war over Europe for at least a quarter of a century. But the past ten days have been so calamitous that there is a real possibility that her Chequers gambit — threatening a general election unless MPs support her watered-down version of Brexit — could lead to the fall of the government and the ceding of power to the most left-wing Labour administration in history.

The mood in Parliament is now as anarchic as it was during the last days of the Callaghan government in 1979: the Maastricht crisis in 1992 looks rather tame by comparison. Like John Major, May has resorted to trying to get through day-to-day business by threatening to turn what should be routine votes into issues of confidence. Unlike Major, she has no majority to do that. When it came to defeating what would have been a destructive amendment to force Britain to join a customs union if no trade deal can be agreed by 21 January next year, May relied on the votes of three Labour MPs — people who have no reason to vote for her in any confidence motion.

It is hard to recall that, just 15 months ago, Theresa May appeared to be the most popular of prime ministers. She was headed, it seemed, for a general election landslide over Jeremy Corbyn. Moreover, she had a credible policy for enacting Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, as she had laid out in her Lancaster House speech in January 2017: to leave the single market and customs union and instead to seek a free trade deal with the EU. Were it to prove impossible to negotiate such a deal, then Britain would leave the EU without one.