May for PM? Maybe!

These are salad days for Grub Street. Almost every day a front-page story drops into the media’s laps like over-ripe  fruit. There is so much stuff that sub-editors would be driven to distraction, except there are no longer any subs. The media prowls the field after the battle, bayonetting the wounded.

 

The headlines have written themselves; here’s a sample:

 

‘Stop Johnson’ plot may delay contest for months’

Osbourne mulls deal to make Boris PM.

Boris withdraws.

 

And just by way of a change

 

‘Corbyn crisis’

 

The story changes literally by the hour. ‘The man of tomorrow’  yesterday is yesterday’s man today.

 

On Wednesday, it was a shoo-in for Gove. On Thursday, it became the turn of the Home Secretary.

 

That Teresa May is now favourite when only a few days ago the bookies had her as an ‘also-ran’ is clear proof that politics has become deranged.

 

She has but one aptitude – survivability. She is the longest serving Home Secretary for about half a century, in a job that is a notorious graveyard for ambitious politicians.

 

One of the biggest issues in the referendum campaign was immigration - the total failure to control it, the promise to bring numbers down when in fact they spun out of control, the scandal over border force naval cutters or, rather, lack of them. In every respect, her management of border controls has been an abject failure. The consequence is that HMG has not the faintest idea about numbers, illegals, asylum seekers or much else apart from the fact that immigration is three times as high as the Government’s promise.

 

Some of her activities – or lack of them – border on the bizarre.

 

Despite being continually frustrated by deportation orders being set aside by the courts as a result of ECHR judgements, she rejected the chance to get rid of ECHR jurisdiction and revert to the position pre-1998 and the Human Rights Act. Otherwise ECHR judgements would be persuasive only, meaning that the courts would be free to follow them or not. At the same time, she refused to exercise an option to cease to recognise the oppressive European Arrest Warrant.

 

And when one of the biggest policing scandals of all time emerged, the neglect of duty or even connivance of all the regulatory bodies to take action against  child abuse by Pakistanis against young white girls that had gone on for decades, her head was well below the parapet.

 

To add to the gaiety of nations, there is now a spate of hair-pulling and eye-scratching between Teflon Tess and Sarah Vain, Gove’s wife, over an e-mail  that got into the wrong hands; it was a list of orders and instructions from this latter-day Lady Macbeth to Gove on how to deal with Boris.

 

The question that the Tory Party appears not to be asking itself is ‘Will she appeal to voters?’ She does not come across as empathetic, but her ambition is almost palpable. She carefully kept her head below the parapet during the referendum campaign, showing no real preference for either side. Likeable? Electable? Hmm!

 

And at the end of the day the Establishment is still missing the point.

 

It was not merely, or even principally, about ‘in’ or ‘out’. It was anti ‘them’, the condescending denizens of the Westminster Village who still believe that 17.5 million voters are  misguided fools.

 

It was an update of Cromwell’s advice to corrupt and useless MPs.

 

‘You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!’