Call it a stay of execution. Theresa May exists on a different time scale to most ordinary people. While the rest of us try to plan weeks, months – sometimes even years – ahead, the prime minister has a much narrower focus. Minutes, hours and days. Just getting to the end of any given 24-hour period with her job still intact is cause enough for celebration. Even if the cold sweats are sure to begin again at dawn the next day.
No wonder then that May seemed relieved – if mentally drained – when she eventually appeared outside Downing Street to give a brief statement. Her Brexit deal, which even she wasn’t sure she fully understood – other than it was better than no deal, worse than what the UK already had and nothing like what she had promised – had survived its first contact with her cabinet. She was still just about in the game.
Not that it had been easy. Cabinet had overrun by several hours. Even Alun Cairns – who was he again? – had insisted on droning on. At length. Like all the others, pretending he knew what he was talking about. When it was clear no one did. Then Karen Bradley had needed to check on which bit was Northern Ireland and which was the republic. At which point the government cancelled the press statement only for the government to reinstate the press statement when it emerged that the government didn’t know it hadn’t cancelled the press statement. ITV had live broadcast pictures of the front door for more than five hours. Who knew chaos took quite this long? A metaphor for Brexit itself.
“There had been impassioned debate,” May said, looking tight-lipped. As in severe reservations. Penny Mordaunt and Esther McVey might still resign, but she could live with that. Both fell under the heading of acceptable collateral damage. Come to think of it, their departures might even be an unexpected bonus as she couldn’t remember them ever having done anything useful. If only Chris Grayling would do the decent thing as well, it would be a red-letter day.
All the big hitters had stayed on board, though. Dominic Raab had become a pushover ever since his geography lesson and the rest had surrendered to her logic. Her deal was every bit as bad as she had always led them to believe it would be, so if they were to storm out in a strop it would rather imply they had never grasped the details.
To make it a full house, the Four Pot Plants had more or less succumbed to her argument that the best way of showing you were taking back control was to hand it all back to the EU. After all, it was consensus of a sort if Remainers and Leavers both disliked her deal. Unity through disunity. Best of all, Tony Blair had even spent the afternoon calling her draft deal ‘a capitulation’. Nobody believed a word he said these days. Not even when he was telling the truth.
Prime minister’s questions had also passed off without too much damage being inflicted. It could have been better, mind. It was just typical that Jeremy Corbyn had chosen this day of all days to ask about Brexit. Normally the Labour leader could be relied upon to use his six questions to cross-examine her about bus timetables at a moment of national crisis.
But though Corbyn had managed to land a couple of glancing blows on the backstop agreement and the red ink that she had put through her red lines, here had nothing to cause her much grief. Certainly nothing that her uncanny ability to find different ways of failing to answer a question directly couldn’t handle. “Let me be clear,” she had said, as she went on to explain why everyone had always known that what they were voting for in the referendum was any deal she just happened to manage to agree with the EU. Her default denial algorithm was in perfect working order.
There had been one minor alarm when Iain Duncan Smith had got to his feet, but it soon turned out that all he wanted was a complete reversal of government policy on the timing of the new £2 top rates for fixed odds betting terminals. That was no bother. Throwing Philip Hammond and Jeremy Wright to the wolves was an unexpected pleasure. All that mattered was the here and now. Just breathe. She’d got all her life to live. She’d got all her love to give. She had survived. She would survive. Until tomorrow at least.
