One precedent for tonight’s vote is the Conservative leadership contest in 1995, when John Major unexpectedly called a contest and John Redwood stood against him. Major got 218 votes (66%) and Redwood 89 (27%). Tonight’s ballot is a confidence vote, not a leadership contest, but the numbers might fall in similar ways. If May’s critics get more than 86 votes tonight, they will be doing better than Redwood in 1995. On the night that was seen as a clear victory for Major, but for the rest of his premiership his authority was diminished. “Weaker than John Major” is not a label any PM would covet.
I was so glad to read that MPs who have sexual allegations against them are suspended in from the party in all respects except deciding whether they want a woman as a leader.
Exactly the problem. It is the reason she became leader in the first place (with around the same number of votes). Gove, Johnson, Rudd, Leadsom are all palpably worse.
Any chance of a Labour-Green-SNP coalition government with Nicola Sturgeon as PM?
The Brexiters lost, but Theresa May is weaker than John Major was after 1995. I don’t see how that could have gone any better for anyone who wants to see the Tories fail.
Now we just need the People’s Vote (nothing to do with Brexit will get through parliament now) and maybe we can stop this mess from happening.
I don’t Theresa May or her politics, but it’s hard for me to believe that whoever the alternative would have been wouldn’t have been worse. The one way in which May impresses me is that she apparently just won’t give up trying to make the best of a bad situation. If I were her, I would have gone off on Boris Johnson a long time ago.
He is a ditherer by nature. Not a leader. His / Labour’s policies may be needed but it is highly unlikely he would get to No. 10 and if he did we might see as much and as bad infighting in a Labour govt as we’ve seen in the Tories. His inability to lead could well destroy his govt and possibly his party. If he just stopped dithering about a People’s Vote that would be a start, for sure. But millions of Labour voters who voted Leave would not vote for him in an election if he did that. So he will do everything to avoid being seen as leading calls for another referendum.
It’s a shame, because he could be the person to address those voters, to tell them bluntly that there’s no future for a UK outside the EU and that the only way to push back against the EU’s kneejerk bent toward neoliberalism is by participating in the union. Instead he wallows in nostalgia for his 1960s and '70s “glory days” (when a socialist Britain that could stand alone was still a mildly plausible delusion for him to hold) and sacrifices the prospects of young people at the altar of short-term political expediency.
Cornyn seems like a nice man, he has some good and positive ideas, but he has almost zero leadership skills.
He seems like the nice geography teacher who used to open the class up to discussion; great at theories, useless at action.
Which is a shame because this country could do with a little more humanity and compassion, but that doesn’t tend to go hand in hand with political leadership skills, it’s usually the bastards who are good at that.
