Opinion Out of my mind: Big gamble

The origins of the Brexit vote, indeed of the need to call the Referendum, lie in the recent past of the Conservative Party.

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Meghnad Desai

July 10, 2016 06:14 AM IST First published on: Jul 10, 2016 at 01:42 AM IST

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Voters from both camps in London. Reuters

Now we know that the next Prime Minister of the UK will be a woman. After two rounds of voting in the Conservative Parliamentary Party, three men candidates have been eliminated: two at the first stage and the third, Michael Gove, a leading Leave campaigner, at the second stage. Gove was seen as untrustworthy after he had knifed his friend Boris Johnson in the back just as Johnson was about to announce his candidacy.

That has left two women: Theresa May, who got two thirds of the votes, and Andrea Leadsome, who got about a quarter. May is experienced, having been chairman of the party and Home Secretary for six years, the longest tenure in the job in recent memory. Leadsome is an untried quantity who entered Parliament only in 2010 and has only been a junior minister.

Now the ordinary members of the party get to vote one of the two as leader and hence Prime Minister. Given the wide popularity of Brexit among Tory party members, it is not unlikely that the less experienced candidate may yet win the final vote.

In the 51 years I have lived here, there has never been as much uncertainty and confusion as has been since June 24, when the UK voted to leave the EU. We have a Prime Minister who made himself a lame duck by announcing his resignation on that day, but delaying its implementation till a new leader is chosen by the party. As a result, any serious decision about Brexit and its implications cannot be taken till we have a new Prime Minister. That is likely to be in early September; so no serious government for almost two months. You would not notice it on the streets; things go on as normal but in the political world, there is chaos.

Any other country would be seriously destabilised, but this is an old country, where the wheels turn as they have done by sheer inertia.

The origins of the Brexit vote, indeed of the need to call the Referendum, lie in the recent past of the Conservative Party. When Margaret Thatcher was challenged about her leadership by Michael Heseltine, a pro-European MP in 1990, she failed to win sufficient votes in the first round. In those days, the winning candidate had to have a margin of 10 percentage points above the next person. She resigned.

Since then, the Thacherite Tories have hated Europe. The quarrel wrecked John Major’s term as Prime Minister and then led to three defeats for the party until, in 2005, David Cameron won the leadership.

He had to call a referendum to keep the party together. Now he has lost the gamble and no one knows if after the result in September, the party will still stay together. There have been too much personal animosity and ideological differences within the party to trust things to be peaceful.

It is a cathartic moment. Soon the new leader will have to prepare a strategy for negotiating Brexit with the EU. This will take at least two years. Then there have to be negotiations about alternative arrangements which could take two years. By 2020 we will know which way we are headed.

Only the Brits could gamble like this.