A ‘BREXIT’ GOVERNMENT

– Theresa May speaking outside 10 Downing Street on Wednesday, 13 July. Mrs May will head a Government in Britain that will see the country exiting the European Union.

Intro: Mrs May’s biggest test will be Brexit. She has experience of Brussels, most notably her negotiating skills in successfully carving-out Britain’s opt-out from most EU justice and home-affairs policies in 2014

ON JULY 13, Theresa May, the home secretary, became Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister. The coronation went uncontested after her only remaining rival, Andrea Leadsom, pulled out of the leadership race. Leadsom had the backing of only 84 Tory MPs, as against Mrs May’s 199, the reason she said as to why she withdrew from the contest. But what counted more was that, under pressure, she had shown her unfitness to govern with several gaffes. She hinted that, as a mother, she was somehow better equipped and qualified than Mrs May who has no children.

Following Britain’s decision to leave the European Union a new Tory prime minister is but one feature of the redrawn political landscape. The opposition Labour Party has sunk into ever-deeper chaos and turmoil under Jeremy Corbyn, who now faces a leadership challenge. The populist UK Independence Party has a vacuum at the top following the resignation of its leader, Nigel Farage, on the achievement of his career’s ambition.

Mrs May backed the Remain side in the Referendum, unlike most Tory voters. Yet they welcomed her victory if only because she has shown more political nous than her pro-Brexit opponents. It is quite remarkable that those who sought to break Britain away from the European Union have now largely fled the battlefield, leaving the Remainers to sort out the mess Britain finds itself in. But while Mrs May was only ever lukewarm about the EU, she has promised that ‘Brexit means Brexit’

As home secretary for six years, she built a reputation as a moderniser, picking fights with the police and grappled hard with anti-terrorism laws, deportations of foreigners suspected of terrorism links and the controversial issue of immigration. She was quicker than most of her fellow Conservatives to identify which way the wind was blowing on issues such as gay marriage; in 2002 she warned that many voters saw the Conservative Party as the ‘nasty party’. Mrs May comes to the office of Prime Minister without the privileged background of her predecessor, David Cameron, or many of his inner circle.

Her first task was to form a cabinet. Philip Hammond, previously the foreign secretary, is to be the new chancellor. More surprisingly she gave Boris Johnson, a popular but undiplomatic Brexiteer, the Foreign Office and Liam Fox, a fellow Leaver who resigned from the cabinet in disgrace less than five years ago, the job of international trade secretary. David Davis, a veteran Eurosceptic, will take charge of the Brexit department. Amber Rudd, the energy secretary, will become home secretary. Damien Green heads the Department for Work and Pensions.

A pressing question for Mrs May will be whether she wants or needs a stronger democratic mandate. In 2007, when Gordon Brown assumed the premiership without any Labour challenger, she accused him of running scared by not holding an election to test his credentials. Yet, she now insists that no election is needed before the current parliamentary term ends in 2020. Whilst the Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011 makes it harder than it used to be for prime ministers to opportunistically call early elections, Labour’s disarray and the state of party politics may yet tempt her to try, perhaps as early as next year.

Undoubtedly, Mrs May’s biggest test will be Brexit. She has experience of Brussels, most notably her negotiating skills in successfully carving-out Britain’s opt-out from most EU justice and home-affairs policies in 2014. She also ensured that the UK opted back in to some 35 measures, including Europol, the European Arrest Warrant and the Passenger-Names directive. Mrs May is likely to be welcomed cautiously by EU leaders, most of whom she has not yet met. She has some affinities with Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, including an upbringing as a pastor’s daughter. It is likely that EU leaders will say it is for her to explain how she wants to proceed (and how quickly).

The new prime minister insists there will be no attempt to remain inside the EU and that there will be no second referendum. She has also indicated that she will not trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, the legal route to Brexit, until she has fixed her own negotiating position. And, although as home secretary she was fiercely anti-immigration, she has been careful to insist that free movement of people in the EU cannot continue as it currently operates. She knows the value of full membership of Europe’s single market, and she understands the trade-off that may be necessary between preserving this and setting limits on free movement. It is within this framework that the hard bargaining with Britain’s partners will eventually take place. A ‘Norway-plus’ (or Norway-minus) is a concept that is currently being floated, an idea which would involve trying to keep as much as possible of Britain’s membership of the single market while being permitted to impose some controls or an emergency brake on free movement.

It will help that the recession that is now widely predicted will have the side-effect of curbing immigration. In other respects, though, the economy will be the second big headache for Mrs May. Sensibly, she has abandoned her predecessor’s target of balancing the budget by 2020, and in a speech before being appointed as prime minister she talked of more investment in infrastructure and of the need to improve Britain’s lamentable productivity. More forthrightly, she spoke of having a ‘proper industrial strategy’, widely seen as criticism of the former chancellor, George Osborne, who has left the Government. She also evinced a surprising hostility to foreign takeovers of British companies; and she has leaned towards further social reforms by proposing that workers and consumers should sit on company boards, as well as limiting executive pay by granting shareholders the right of veto over increases to their pay and emoluments. Mrs May’s declared goals of ‘building an economy that works for everyone’ (and not just for the few), as well as doing more to help the poor and disadvantaged who have suffered the most over the past decade, are admirable. Some will argue that Mrs May will need to curb her more interventionist instincts.

The best asset at Mrs May’s disposal, however, will be the chaos of the opposition party. The Conservative Party precipitated the Brexit vote for internal reasons that split their members and decapitated their leadership. But it seems extraordinary that in such a period of upheaval and major change the Conservative Party now appear the more united of the two main political parties.