The big picture
So, it’s Theresa May v Andrea Leadsom in the fight to be the next prime minister, and as a result the talk today is all about Margaret Thatcher. Because – stay with me – she was a woman. And May and Leadsom are also women.
It’s not nothing, of course, that the UK will have its second female prime minister. As Tim Loughton, Leadsom’s campaign manager, put it:
We can now give the party a real choice. A remain woman; a leave woman. They both happened to go to state schools. They are both women.
(He also added that this was “pretty quirky for the Tory party”, which is a shame, really, given that female + state-educated = the majority of the population.)
But is it obligatory for either of them to be the new Thatcher? Have a look at their track records – I was going to say CVs but that’s a whole different question – instead. Maybe there’s more to it than a chromosome and a blouse.
With more votes than her two rivals combined, May steps into the next couple of months – sorry, yes, months – of campaigning with the confidence of knowing the bulk of her parliamentary colleagues are behind her. For as we know, there’s often little to choose between the views of MPs and the views of party members…
What happens next? Here’s a guide to how the voting process works, but in a nutshell: the 150,000 members of the Conservative party each have a vote, and the winner is announced as prime minister on 9 September. Take that, unelected EU bureaucrats!
Boris Johnson, his dreams of traversing the country in support of his own No 10 bid now more tattered that than £350m NHS promise, is expected instead to tub-thump for his new favourite, Leadsom. He wasn’t, however, on hand yesterday for what could qualify as the least comfortable (and I don’t mean footwear: all mention of footwear in connection with the Tory leadership is banned on this blog) political march seen in a long while: the Rally for Leadsom.
Northern Ireland secretary Theresa Villiers looked particularly thrilled to be there:
And what of Michael Gove, erstwhile scourge of teachers and longstanding friends? As Marina Hyde points out, he has at least scored his long professed goal of not being prime minister. Now we will never know if he truly was, as he told us, “constitutionally incapable of it”. Still, perhaps we’ve had our fill of constitutional upheavals this year.
Gove is “naturally disappointed” not to have made the cut, he told reporters. Although now she’s not busy campaigning for her husband, we might be blessed with more details in Sarah Vine’s next Daily Mail column.
Which takes us seamlessly – in format, if not in content – to Jeremy Corbyn’s column in the Guardian this morning.
The Labour leader writes about the 100,000-strong surge in members signing up to join the party since the vote to leave the EU – taking membership to more than 500,000, the largest number in modern party history. As political editor Heather Stewart reports, we can’t know (and won’t until if/when there is ever that rumoured challenge) whether the boost has come from Corbyn-keepers or would-be ousters:
The Keep Corbyn campaign, coordinated by the grassroots group Momentum, believes the bulk of new members would back Corbyn in a challenge; but a rival Saving Labour campaign has been signing up members of the public who want him to stand down.
Corbyn, for one, sounds confident:
MPs also need to respect the democracy of our party and the views of Labour’s membership, which has increased by more than 100,000 to over half a million in the past fortnight alone – by far the largest it has ever been in modern times.
Our priority must now be to mobilise this astonishing new force in politics, and ensure people in Britain have a real political alternative. Those who want to challenge my leadership are free to do so in a democratic contest, in which I will be a candidate.
But the responsibility of our whole party is to stand up in united opposition to the Tory government. If we come together, we can take them on and win.
Perhaps we are now due a quieter spell: Corbyn’s off on holiday, David Cameron’s off to the Nato summit, and the Tory leadership contenders are off to win over the members. Presumably somebody is minding the country.
Does anyone have a Brexit plan yet?
Oh yes, that. Oona King, in a short debate in the House of Lords yesterday, thinks there ought to be a re-run of the referendum, arguing:
Many British people, possibility the majority, were unaware of the far-reaching consequences of the EU referendum … After the dust has settled in the immediate aftermath of the referendum vote, we don’t actually know what we voted for.
Nato leaders meeting Cameron in Warsaw today might also have a few questions along those lines, with Brexit likely to be a matter for concern, according to one official:
How can it not affect western cohesion? How can trillions being wiped out in market value not affect perceptions of western strength?
You should also know:
- More revelations continue to emerge from the Chilcot report as its 12 volumes are read: see the latest here.
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Philip Hammond, the foreign secretary, said the US decision to clear out Ba’athist from the Iraqi army led to the rise of Isis.
- David Cameron will seek to reassure Nato over UK’s defence spending commitments.
- Business minister Sajid Javid opens preliminary trade talks with India.
- Overseas buyers ‘keen to exploit weak pound to buy London homes’.
- Vote Leave Watch aims to hold MPs to account over Brexit promises.
Diary
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David Cameron, still just about the prime minister, flies to Poland for the Nato summit in Warsaw.
- From 2pm the Church of England General Synod meets and will have a debate on Brexit.
Read these
In the Times, Philip Collins argues that May’s victory in the vote “was so overwhelming that the contest should be stopped”:
There are 84 Conservative MPs, people actually paid out of public funds to conduct politics, who believe that Andrea Leadsom should be prime minister. Somebody as smart as former leader Michael Howard should be ashamed of himself …
It is, in any case, a democratic outrage that the next prime minister will be chosen by the 0.3% of the electorate who happen to be odd enough to be members of the Conservative party. Can any of them, I wonder, see the irony of their regular sermons about the lack of ‘democracy’ in the EU? Probably not. These are people who have taken hold of the wrong end of the stick in order to beat the country with it. The candidate of their looking-glass world is the wholly ill-prepared Mrs Leadsom.
In the Spectator, Ross Clark wonders why the all-female shortlist isn’t being lauded as a win for feminism (editorialising alert: feminism doesn’t in fact mean agreeing with anything any woman ever does. Though, hey: feel free to disagree with me):
So now it is certain: the Conservatives will produce Britain’s second female prime minister … So why isn’t the left cheering this social advance? Instead, the bitching has already begun. Andrea Leadsom is being savaged for being less than 100% enthusiastic about gay marriage (bizarrely, she voted for and against in the same vote); while Theresa May is eviscerated for her proposal – since dropped – to withdraw from the European Court of Human Rights.
Laurie Penny in the New Statesman says we ask the wrong questions about women in power:
The truth is that women are not, in fact, magic. Women are, in fact, people, and people who happen to be female are no less complicated and unpredictable than those who happen to be male. Women have just as much capacity to be venal, petty and egomaniacal as men do, although they are less likely to be indulged in such behaviour …
It remains to be seen if the situation for women throughout the country will be made any better by women in Westminster. Poor and vulnerable men, after all, have not historically been guaranteed a good deal just because they shared a gender with their political leaders. Gender equality, like wealth, tends not to trickle down.
Baffling nickname of the day
I’m going to make a wild guess here and assert that Theresa May has never gone by the name of “Tezza”:
Here is tomorrow's front page: Britain is guaranteed to have its second woman Prime Minister pic.twitter.com/LaOJIF997U
— The Sun (@TheSun) July 7, 2016
Celebrity endorsement of the day
Does Nigel Farage count as a celebrity these days? He’ll need something to do once he’s replaced as Ukip leader and out of work as an MEP. Anyway, he’s terribly pleased that Andrea Leadsom could be in No 10.
Congratulations to @andrealeadsom. Important the next Prime Minister is a Brexiteer - she has my backing.
— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) July 7, 2016
If today were a Beyoncé song
It would be Run the World (Girls). But only because there isn’t a song entitled Women Make Up Half the World’s Population, Stop Being Surprised When Some of Them are Allowed to be in Charge of Things.
And another thing
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