Theresa May’s Brexit tour of Britain – she was in Scotland today promoting her EU deal – speaks simultaneously to her strengths and her weaknesses as a politician. The strengths are often too lightly dismissed, and not just by those who primly disdain her as simply an evil Tory. But it is May’s judgmental weaknesses that still shape the political landscape as she battles to carve out a Commons majority on 11 December.
No one I have spoken to at Westminster this week believes May will get her deal through next month. But what a sleepless effort she is putting into overturning the odds. Selling her dog’s dinner of a deal, and in the face of daunting parliamentary arithmetic, May’s determination to succeed appears quixotic, going on suicidal. Yet her resilience in the face of a relentless schedule of Commons grillings, government meetings, speeches and summitry – her trips this week to Brussels, Belfast, Builth Wells and Glasgow are now followed by the sapping 14-hour flights to and from the G20 summit in Argentina – is awesome.
What is more, her efforts are being noticed and approved of by the public. Last Thursday there was a 13-point opinion poll swing over only seven days in May’s favour as the best prime minister for Britain. And today a survey reported in the Daily Mail pointed to a similar shift of opinion in favour of her Brexit deal. Don’t get this wrong: the country remains deeply divided. But there is momentum in favour of May’s deal across the board – including among Labour and remain voters.
Here is a prime minister doing her best to give politics a good name. The Tory party is luckier to have her than they know. Yet there is something seriously disjunctive about barnstorming around the country when the 649 voters who will shape the country’s fate are all across the road in Westminster. Watching May’s one-woman attempt to bring order and compromise out of the chaos of which she is in so many ways the author, it is hard not to conclude: c’est magnifique, but it’s not very good politics.
Maybe we’re all wrong. Maybe May’s efforts to rally the public will create pressure over the next two weeks to push enough MPs into her lobby. But she would have had a far easier time if throughout the Brexit process she had reached out more thoughtfully to the majority of MPs, who would – and possibly still want to – support a workable compromise.
Right now, though, it is defeat that looms for May. The consequences could be seismic. I bumped into a historically minded old colleague this week who immediately said, with a mix of excitement and horror: “It’s 1846 all over again. It’s 1886. It’s 1922. It’s one of those moments when everything is recast.”
My friend may well be right. But in some ways May’s problem goes beyond those that were faced by Peel, Gladstone or Lloyd George. May’s problem is not simply that extricating Britain from the EU is itself hellishly difficult after 45 years of convergence. It’s that the crisis through which she is attempting to navigate is ensnared in a constitutional tangle that those earlier leaders never had to face – the conflict between referendums and representative democracy.
Right from the start May seemed to intuit the size of the political trap that was created by a referendum vote to support an outcome – Brexit – that most MPs and all the main parties opposed. The wish to “parliamentarise” the referendum vote of 2016 lay behind her decision to call the 2017 general election. She hoped she could win a mandate to require Tory remainer MPs to back her version of Brexit.
If she had won, then referendum and parliament might have been aligned, albeit in a bad Brexit cause. Her failure in the election did not just throw away the Tory majority and empower the backbenches and minor parties. It also left the conflict between referendums and parliamentary government fundamentally unresolved.
As a result, all of the issues that were launched by the 2016 Brexit verdict have remained unresolved too. The referendum said leave. But it never said what it wanted leave to mean, beyond exiting the EU. It was silent on the terms of withdrawal and the future relationship. It never said what should happen if the terms were unsatisfactory or if they split the country. It never said what should happen if some of the component parts of the UK voted differently from the majority. It made no provision for second thoughts or for the kind of citizens’ assembly that helped Ireland to find a solidly based way through its recent abortion referendum.
The 2017 election also meant that May had to change her approach to Brexit. She no longer had the votes in parliament or the authority over her party to deliver the hard deal she had proposed in October 2016. She needed to take a fresh approach but was culpably slow to learn this lesson, and it is why she is staring defeat in the face today. Her Brexit tour is thus a kind of general election campaign without the public vote.
May has never been a good collegiate politician with other parties. As home secretary during the coalition frombetween 2010 and 2015 she simply pretended the Liberal Democrats did not exist. After June 2017 she was too damaged to take Brexit out of the hands of the Tory nationalists and to explore a version that other parties, and Labour backbenchers in particular, might have been persuaded to support. She stood up to the nationalists only towards the very end of the negotiation process, forcing several to resign but coming back with a deal that offends committed leavers and remainers alike.
None of this has been easy in a hung parliament, with the two major parties both deeply split. None of it is simple in a political culture relentlessly undermined by an overmighty and not very good media. Attempting it is hard at a time when the digital revolution has usurped the earlier influence of now much diminished institutions, communities and interest groups that once helped to make parliament, for all its imperfections, the cornerstone of national decision-making.
But it has to be done. The disruption of parliamentary politics by the referendum, combined with May’s failure to reach out to Labour, has left British politicians in a weak place from which to reassert the authority of representative government. But it is the problem to which Britain and other modern democracies need an answer. It is not just Britain’s relationship with the EU that will be on the line as MPs vote on 11 December. It’s parliamentary democracy too.
• Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
