May’s time is over – but Brexit hasn’t claimed its last casualty yet

For all his gifts, Boris Johnson cannot alter the reality of our weak negotiating position with the EU

As in the final scene of a Shakespearean tragedy, there are tears, blood on the walls and bodies litter the stage. Some 35 ministers have quit during the short premiership of Theresa May, the last being Andrea Leadsom with her opportunistic stiletto between the prime minister’s shoulder blades. She was, to borrow a phrase, a dead woman walking by then in any case.

Now the prime minister herself has, in effect, been pushed onto the tottering Tory funeral pyre. Outside Westminster, strewn across the electoral battlefield lie the remains of a Tory party being routed across the country – another 1,300 defeated councillors, scores of Conservative MEPs trounced by the pincer movement of Nigel Farage to the right and Vince Cable to the centre. Many Conservative constituency associations, once part of the warp and weft of life in rural and suburban Britain exist on paper only.

When the results are declared, it may well be that the Conservative Party has polled less than 10 per cent in Thursday’s European elections. It certainly seems set for its lowest share of the vote in national elections since the Great Reform Act of 1832. And to think that only two years ago, before her disastrous snap election, Ms May stood astride British politics like a kitten-heeled colossus, an Iron Lady for our times: more Irony Lady now.

Even in a general election, according to the polls, the Conservatives would only “bounce back” to about 28 per cent, behind Labour, and another catastrophic failure.

So there they are, then. The only problem is that this lot are trying to govern the UK and negotiate Brexit. Theresa May will carry the can for the mess, conveniently enough for her successor, but she should not take all of the blame. Her party refuses to be led.

That Labour would hardly do better simply adds to the sense of crisis and chaos. The local elections and, in all likelihood, the European election results confront Labour with an uncomfortable truth: that their “creative ambiguity” on Brexit, successful for a while, is unravelling. It now mainly succeeds in alienating both sides of the argument and all their potential support, rather than uniting them, as Jeremy Corbyn so vaguely hopes and claims. It makes Mr Corbyn, man of principle, look shifty: this is bad for Brand Corbyn.

By contrast, recently, the parties that have done best, such as the Brexit Party and the Liberal Democrats, are those that have at least offered a clear message. The sooner Mr Corbyn decides to honour the wishes of his MPs, his members and his voters the better for him. If he does not, he may follow Ms May into political oblivion.

As Theresa May is relegated to the footnotes of history, so too is the “soft Brexit” she and her colleagues spent almost three years negotiating. As a result, sooner or later, the next prime minister, their party and the whole House of Commons will be faced with the choice that Ms May has warned them about many times: no deal or no Brexit. Though the timing and the procedural detail cannot be foreseen, that fundamental truth will eventually crystallise, and, with Ms May gone and the 31 October deadline approaching, it will be no longer possible to kick the can down the road again, or at least not easily. Some in the EU, too, may be running out of patience.

The next Conservative leader – with the momentum seemingly building up behind Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab, will be a Conservative Leaver. There will be breezy talk about renegotiating Brexit. They will promise a fresh start. They will go to Brussels in the hope of securing the free trade agreement they have always dreamed of – Canada plus. It was the promise offered up by Theresa May in her Lancaster House speech, the one when she famously declared: “I am equally clear that no deal for Britain is better than a bad deal for Britain” and laid down the mutually contradictory red lines.

Since then, a few things have happened; the Conservatives lost their majority in the House of Commons; logic and reality collided with Ms May’s red lines and prevailed. That is how the tough talk of Lancaster House morphed into the May deal – the Chequers agreement – signed by Ms May and the UK last November.

The Conservative Party is labouring under the dangerous illusion that the May deal can be swiftly redrafted, and that all the difficult problems that have proved so intractable for months will be dissolved by the fact that Boris Johnson is a cleverer and more dedicated Brexiter than Ms May; that Mr Johnson will enjoy a handsome mandate provided by the British Conservative party’s membership (about 0.25 per cent of the UK electorate); and that he will be surrounded by trusty lieutenants of like mind, rather than the supposed Brexit saboteurs and traitors such as Olly Robbins, Philip Hammond and Mark Carney.

Wrong. Mr Johnson, when he was a more amusing fellow than he is now, said that he was “in favour of having his cake and eating it”. The EU will remind him of his little quip – and that it cannot be done. They will say, firmly, that the deal on the table is what it is, and that, while they are happy to talk and clarify the political declaration, there is no point trying to re-open the withdrawal agreement: the Irish backstop stays. In any case, there will be no time to start all over again.

Mr Johnson may then walk out and threaten no deal – but everyone knows this parliament will never approve it. The EU can, as things stand, effectively push the UK out of the EU by refusing any further extensions to the Article 50 deadline. Mr Johnson might even provoke President Macron and others into making such a move.

The only option is for the Commons, somehow, to wrench back control over proceedings so that Article 50 can be revoked, or a Final Say referendum is held so that the people can decide their fate, or both.

If Mr Johnson is as canny a fellow as he clearly believes himself to be, then he will take that opportunity to press the reset button. This could – should – mean a Final Say referendum, in which the Johnson option of no deal is set against the option to Remain. Mr Johnson can take his policy and his alternative vision to the country and see if he wins. No doubt Nigel Farage would again be a willing ally in the endeavour, and, conceivably, in a Conservative-Brexit Party alliance.

A fresh referendum would not be a re-run of 2016, because then the true shape of Brexit was utterly unclear. The 2019 referendum would be one where the electors are as well-informed about their choice as they can be, after three years of argument and debate.

Mr Johnson, for all his gifts, cannot alter the parliamentary arithmetic, nor solve the Irish border problem, nor the EU’s policy, nor the balance of power between the UK and the EU, with an economy 10 times the size of Britain’s. Europe could easily claim another casualty. The tragedy is far from over. There will be more tears before Brexit.