So, good-bye Dave, welcome Theresa. It's a pity we won't have the edifying spectacle of the Tory Party at large fighting over who is going to lead us all into a bright new future, shorn of all the weight and inconvenience of economic stability and membership of the world's largest trading bloc.
I think on balance we got the lesser of two evils in Mrs May. Mrs Leadsom could have turned out to be a fairly nasty piece of work, if her pronouncements are anything to go by. She clearly lacked experience and political nous and didn't like the pressure put upon her by her detractors. She has turned out so far to be a bit of a political mayfly. She hatched, fluttered around in the breeze for a brief few hours in the sun and then disappeared. Mayflies, however brief their lives, and it's only the adult form which lives for a short time, the larval stage has been living for up to two years on the back benches and as a junior minister, without anybody taking any notice of them, mayflies don't throw the country into confusion when they shuffle off.
Mrs May must be feeling mixed emotions this morning. On the one hand she won. She won without having to reveal what her favoured direction would be, other than saying that Brexit means Brexit, which is both self-evident and ambiguous at the same time.
On the other, she was expecting nine weeks in which to decide which of her charming colleagues in the Parliamentary Party she wanted in her shadow cabinet, and nine weeks in which to decide how she was going to deal with Brexit and all the other stuff a Prime Minister has to deal with. Instead Cameron has told her she will be installed in Downing Street by Wednesday evening.
We shall no doubt find out soon who she has chosen to help her in her task of taking the UK out of the EU without destroying our economy. She is a Tory and I would prefer it if we didn't have a Tory in the job at all. However every indication is that she is going to be there until 2020 and so we had better get used to the idea. In her favour I have to say that despite her toriness she has already grasped the fact that she needs to make the right noises, and so far, and I stress this as she hasn't had time to ripen as a real force yet, what she has said seems refreshingly free of the ideology which characterised both the Thatcher and Cameron Governments.
Both of these governments had visions for a better Britain: Thatcher wanted rid of the unions and to reduce the power of the state; Cameron and Osborne had some economically illiterate plan to balance the books. Everything else was sacrificed on the altars of these false gods. Thatcher's success in demonising the working class and the power of the unions is, I think, at the heart of the problems within the Labour Party today. Her market driven vision of the world has become an orthodoxy which suits the wealthy, and which those who in no way benefit from it have swallowed without apparent question. People take for granted workers rights which were hard won by the unions and which could be under threat when we leave the EU. The unions have for so long been demonised that many have forgotten what they are there for.
We are fortunate that Cameron's unfettered reign was so short. His visions of austerity, and the Big Society (remember that?) were initially held in check by the Lib Dems in the coalition, indeed the extent to which this was the case only really became clear when he won an overall Tory majority in 2015. Nevertheless the sheer brutality of this ideology has caused suffering amongst the disadvantaged on a scale which is impossible to forgive. I am delighted to see the back of The Pig Poker General, and never want to see or hear from him again, although I am sure he will make a meal of PMQs on Wednesday, his swan song. Let's hope he ends up stuffed on a plate at the next royal banquet. The one fly in the ointment is the Boy Gideon, who has continued to lurk in the shadows and who is tipped for a cabinet post, blessedly not his current job, but possibly Foreign Secretary. Quite what the evil little worm has done to deserve this I have absolutely no Idea. Is it a case of better to have him in the tent pissing out than outside pissing in? We shall have to see. I hope at least that we have seen the last of the odious prig which is Ian Duncan Smith.
One other thing in her favour and I will stop after this because it seems as if I am a Mrs May supporter which I am avowedly not, is that she didn't go to Eton, and wan't a member of the Bullingdon Club. She seems to have had a fairly conventional education ending up with a second in geography from Oxford. She is serious about what she does and is unlikely to panic which is arguably what we need at the present as we try to salvage our economy and leave the EU on the best possible terms and with the minimum of damage. She will probably get on well with the other Angela in Berlin. Let's hope she does for all our sakes.
To turn briefly to matters Labour. It seems to be turning even nastier, but I shall wait to see what the decision of the NEC is before I say any more. I did listen to this programme, the first of three made by Steve Richards about the rise of Corbyn and well worth a listen I feel.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07jyrdn
Enjoy your day.
Love Tim xx
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