Allies of David Davis were accused of smearing Theresa May’s husband last night as they claimed that Philip May was urging the prime minister to resign.
A close friend of the Brexit secretary said that “those who love” May want her to take the initiative and stand down.
May and her husband are travelling to Switzerland next week for a walking holiday in the country where Margaret Thatcher used to relax. Friends of Davis are openly speculating that she could use the trip to decide to walk away from Downing Street. She used a hiking holiday in Wales at Easter to reverse her opposition to a general election.
“She’s completely shot,” one Davis ally said. “ I know there are people talking to her about how it would be better for her to take the initiative rather than to be done in.
“She looks so wounded that it isn’t her enemies that are saying that, it is people who love her.”
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The MP added that Philip May would be “incredibly important in persuading her. He’s a politician himself. He was president of the Oxford Union so he knows the game.”
May’s friends reacted with fury to the claims, accusing Team Davis of running a smear campaign to destabilise her. A senior cabinet minister said: “It’s black ops and completely untrue.”
Downing Street sources admit that May has endured huge psychological strain as a result of the botched election campaign.
Her new chief of staff, Gavin Barwell, has told colleagues that the prime minister “has been in a very bad place” over the past month while expressing the belief that she is “now much better”.
A second close associate of Davis last week approached a cabinet minister in a House of Commons bar, urging him to oust May, declaring that she needed to be gone “within two weeks” for the good of the country and the party.
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If the prime minister stood down of her own accord, the plotters say that they would stage an election to narrow the field of candidates to two when parliament returned in September.
The first Davis ally said: “She’s virtually certain to be gone during 2017 unless something very bizarre happens. The parliamentary party can vote for the two finalists before the party conference and the two finalists can strut their stuff at the conference and you can have a vote quite quickly after that between the two of them in the country.”
Details of the plotting came a week after it emerged that Andrew Mitchell, the former cabinet minister who ran Davis’s 2005 leadership campaign, had called at a private dinner for May to go.
At a second dinner Mitchell warned that “for the Conservative Party, Europe has become akin to an ancient biblical curse”, which those present interpreted as a coded claim that only the Brexit secretary could sort out the mess.
A third friend of Davis said Mitchell had not been reprimanded for speaking out. “I don’t think [Davis] is in the slightest bit annoyed,” the friend said.
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“There’s a widespread belief that [May’s] position is unsustainable. Her authority is shattered.”
PM rival flashes £1,000 watch
First there were Theresa May’s £995 leather trousers, now the man who wants to replace her as prime minister is wearing a titanium Garmin watch costing £1,169.99.
David Davis wore the device after intelligence chiefs said spies could use his Apple watch to listen to his conversations and steal Britain’s Brexit secrets.
Asked whether the Garmin Fenix Chronos watch — advertised as “for athletes and adventurers” — was “government issue”, Davis said: “You must be joking — that’s a thousand-quid watch.”
