Theresa May’s Brexit ‘deal’ has been rejected by parliament.
Everyone saw this coming, but few imagined she’d lose by quite such a large margin: 432 to 202.
It’s the worst defeat ever suffered by a British government:
Theresa May is talking a brave game — she always does. But it’s really hard to see how she can soldier on after this. Her MPs have lost all respect for her; her party feels betrayed by her; the army groups and divisions on the map in her bunker are purely imaginary ones.
In political terms she’s surely now a dead woman walking.
I hope she is, I really do.
She deserves no sympathy. This problem is almost entirely of her own making. When she landed the position of Prime Minister — by a fluke: all the other candidates self-destructed — she really only had one job: deliver on her promise that “Brexit means Brexit.”
It wasn’t hard. She had the majority of the country behind her — even many traditional Labour voters.
But she wasn’t capable of delivering Brexit because she never believed in Brexit.
I see that I’m now talking about her in the past tense. I hope I’m right to do so.
As Cromwell said to the Rump Parliament, now the country must say to Theresa May:
“You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.”