What can May say to the Tory Remainers?

I don’t see it. I do not see the anatomy of how it all pans out. Theresa May will be the next Prime Minister because, jeez, who else is going to be? What I cannot see, though, is what she says, and to whom, along the way. Most of all, I cannot see what she says to Remainers.

‘Who cares?’ you may be thinking, and ‘get over it’ and ‘you lost’ and so on. Yet these arguments, while powerful, only get us so far. The fact is, quite a lot of people who formerly voted Conservative also voted Remain. In Mrs May’s own constituency, indeed, she may have a majority of a smidge over 29,000, but she also faces an electorate who, by a margin of almost 8 per cent, voted against leaving the European Union.

Across the country at large, somewhere in the region of 80 Conservative seats went that way, too. Out of all Conservative voters, 40 per cent of them did. So I find myself wondering how, as the leader of a political party that is holding an election specifically to make this thing they didn’t want to happen happen more effectively, Theresa May plans to court their vote. What does she say?

She can’t just threaten them with Jeremy Corbyn. That won’t work at all. There are degrees of uselessness, and the big problem with Corbyn is that he’s too useless to be useful to anybody. Ed Miliband, in retrospect, was just perfectly useless enough, so that David Cameron could say, ‘Imagine if he won, wouldn’t Britain be chaotic and awful?’ and people could imagine this, and decided Cameron was right. Which may feel somewhat ironic two insane years later, but that’s beside the point. Project Fear, you might call it. You can’t say, ‘Imagine if Corbyn won’, though, because almost literally nobody can.