Theresa May risks being remembered as one of the least successful prime ministers in the modern history of Britain.
Her defenders will dispute comparisons with Neville Chamberlain, who sought to compromise with Adolf Hitler; Anthony Eden, who involved the country in a catastrophic bid to capture the Suez Canal; and David Cameron, who triggered the EU referendum that ended his political career.
Mrs May was left to deal with the consequences of that vote. She described Brexit in her resignation statement on Friday as “the biggest peacetime challenge any government has faced”.
But, with the benefit of hindsight, several self-inflicted errors contributed to her drawn-out but brutal demise as prime minister less than three years after she took office on July 13 2016.
1. 2016 Conference speech and beyond
Mrs May’s downfall can be traced back to one of the earlier moments of her premiership, when, in a speech to the Conservative party conference on October 2 2016, she in effect pledged to pursue a hard-Brexit policy.
By promising to end the free movement of EU citizens and escape the sway of the European Court of Justice, she left open no other viable avenue other than an exit from the EU’s single market — despite the potential economic disruption of such a course.
“The referendum was a slim result [by 52 to 48 per cent], and she could have gone for a more consensual cross-party kind of Brexit, but instead she interpreted it as a demand for an even harder Brexit than many Leave campaigners had asked for,” said Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London.
In another conference speech three days later, she coined the phrase “citizens of nowhere”, a term that some EU nationals — and British citizens — found deeply offensive. “If you look back at her rhetoric then, she clearly spoke in very divisive terms and alienated many of those who had been inclined to accept losing the referendum,” said Prof Bale.
In January 2017, Mrs May doubled down on her hard-Brexit stance, announcing formally that the UK would quit not just the single market but also the EU’s customs union while seeking a new, vague “customs agreement”.
2. 2017 election
Mrs May’s decision in April 2017 to call a snap general election will be remembered as an unenforced error of epic proportions.
At the time, the Tories enjoyed a huge lead in the opinion polls. Senior colleagues including David Davis, the then Brexit secretary, urged her to go to the country to increase Tory representation in the House of Commons, bolster her political capital and gain more room for manoeuvre to push though an exit deal.
When the count came in on June 9 Mrs May had lost her slender Commons majority and her political authority was shattered.
But perhaps a still bigger blunder than calling the poll was the election campaign itself. Mrs May had already been dubbed the “Maybot” by one newspaper sketchwriter. Now, her robotic style was on prime time for weeks.
Urged by her joint chief of staff, Nick Timothy, Mrs May produced a manifesto that included a policy that would force the elderly to pay all but the last £100,000 of their care costs. This was almost immediately dubbed a “dementia tax”.
“They put out policies that hadn’t been road tested,” said Paul Goodman, editor of the ConservativeHome website. “The election was not the mistake, it was not being clear what it was for.”
3. Failure to seek consensus early
After failing to triumph at the general election, Mrs May, in theory, had a chance to forge a cross-party consensus on Brexit. Instead she continued on her chosen path of quitting both the single market and customs union.
By the time that the prime minister finally sought formal talks with Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party — in the spring of this year — she had already endured three Commons defeats on her withdrawal agreement and had lost most of her political authority.
With the clock already ticking on her time in Number 10, Labour MPs were unable to believe her assurances about the longevity of any potential deal. John McDonnell, shadow chancellor, compared the cross-party talks that sought a Brexit compromise to trying to do business with a company that was about to enter administration.
4. Speech on March 20
In the run-up to the third big Brexit vote this year Mrs May gave a speech outside 10 Downing Street, blaming MPs from all parties for the government’s failure to deliver Brexit.
“The public have had enough. You’re tired of the infighting. You’re tired of the political games and the arcane procedural rows,” she said. “Tired of MPs talking about nothing else but Brexit.”
Her call for compromise came from the heart. But the speech backfired terribly, prompting fury from MPs in both Labour and the Conservative party. Some who had considered voting for Mrs May’s deal claimed they would no longer do so, expressing anger about her criticism of “political games”. “It was a huge, low-grade error of trust and judgment,” said Mr Goodman.
5. No-deal rhetoric
Mrs May never really considered a no-deal Brexit a viable option given the potential economic disruption that it would entail.
But, in the 2016 election and ahead of negotiations with Brussels she repeatedly warned that “no deal is better than a bad deal”.
Now, to the horror of many mainstream MPs, the prospect of a no-deal Brexit is increasingly popular among Leave-voting members of the public. Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, which is steadfastly opposed to Mrs May’s deal, looks set to win this week’s European elections. Surveys also indicate that the overwhelming majority of Tory party members also favour no-deal.
It seems likely that any second referendum — if it comes to that point — would have to have “No Deal” on the ballot paper.
Mrs May insisted recently that she had only used the phrase “in the abstract”. But she played a part in popularising the idea that quitting without an agreement would not be disastrous for the UK economy.
“She legitimised the shift in view among many Tory Brexiters from wanting a close relationship with Europe to backing no deal,” said Prof Bale.
