In the fullness of time, it may be that historians will conclude that David Cameron’s calling of an EU referendum in order to “heal the divisions” in the party was, on balance, misguided.
But it should not be judged a complete failure. By accidentally ending his career, and being replaced by a persistently malfunctioning robot, this plan to heal party divisions is reaping some success. The only problem is that it’s healing divisions in the wrong party.
Make no mistake. Theresa May is bringing the Labour Party together, one self-inflicted disaster at a time.
With the Big Disaster, Brexit, Theresa May knows she has some wriggle room, because Labour is as hopelessly ruined over that as her own party.
But what do you know? If you roll out a new benefits system that involves stopping people’s benefits for six whole weeks and then set up a “helpline” to find out what’s going on that charges 55p a minute to call? Well, that’s the sort of thing that the whole Labour Party really can get authentically outraged about.
At some point, these words will surely start to feel less surreal as they exit my fingers, but at Prime Minister’s Questions, Jeremy Corbyn gave Theresa May the hammering she deserved.
The Prime Minister, on the very best of these occasions as light on her feet as a pissed water buffalo, had her first lame pre-planned answer snatched from her with Corbyn’s very first words.
The Labour leader began by “welcoming the unemployment figures”, the very thing Theresa May has, on at least ten separate occasions, accused him of not doing, then reminded her, yet again of the central defining fact of British politics which she consistently seeks to ignore – that real wages are lower now than a decade ago.
The session began a couple of hours after the Work and Pensions Secretary David Gauke had confirmed that the 55p a minute hotline would be scrapped. This is a huge victory for Labour, but in the realm of real life, rather than politics, it should perhaps be remembered that the main problem is the problem itself, not the hotline about the problem. And that, problem – universal credit – is staying.
“It is a system that encourages people to get into the workplace,” Theresa May insisted.
It is also a system that encourages people to get into food banks, pay day loan centres and, in many cases, out of their homes and on to the streets.
Newly elected Laura Pidcock MP, she of fleeting“I-could-never-be-friends-with-a-Tory” fame, asked Theresa May if the decision to roll this policy out over Christmas was “either gross incompetence of calculated cruelty.”
As Theresa May proffered a non-answer, the 29 year old member for North West Durham shook her head in angry disbelief.
“The Honourable lady is shaking her head, she may not be willing to listen,” she said with a semi-dismissive scowl.
But the withering matriarch act does not work when your credibility is shot to pieces.
Can it really be scarcely a year since this seemingly invincible woman seemed to be exorcised by the ghost of Thatcher, pinning the hapless Corbyn to the wall?
Indeed, as she angled her neck and peered with disdain over the top of spectacles that weren’t there, it was almost as if she had been haunted by a new ghost.
Remember that faintly ridiculous geography teacher you used to see around these parts at this time of the week? He of the bad suit, the undone top button, his own party sitting silently humiliated behind him. Does Theresa May, as someone once said, rrrremind you of anybody?
