Every afternoon an email is sent out by Conservative HQ to MPs and aides listing what is running on the news. Yesterday’s was late.
A note at the top read: “Delay due to power failure at CCHQ.” The metaphors just write themselves.
To make matters worse, the email detailed the desperate pleading of ministers to “pull together” as criticism of Theresa May mounts.
This morning’s round of the papers is even worse. The Times splashes on details of a fundraising event last week at which there was “utter despair” among Tory donors.
Dominic Johnson, a Tory party treasurer, apparently stood up and said to the room: “I love Theresa May, who could possibly want to replace her?” A quarter of the room made clear that they wanted her gone.
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Cabinet ministers who returned to Westminster yesterday to “take stock” have been shocked by the deterioration in May’s position. Almost everyone is drawing a direct connection between the botched, baffling reshuffle and the fresh downturn in the PM’s fortunes.
This morning May chairs cabinet. To get a sense of how awkward this could be, it’s worth watching Morten Morland’s frighteningly accurate animation.
If it was just one thing, it might be rescuable. But the PM is fighting – or at least under fire – on several fronts.
Domestic policy – or the lack of it – is openly criticised even by allies like Nick Timothy, the former chief of staff, who yesterday accused the government of “strategic confusion”.
The PM has also been openly mocked by Angela Merkel for her inability to make a decision. The German chancellor apparently told reporters that when she asks May what she wants, May says “make me an offer”.
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Merkel points out: “But you’re leaving; we don’t have to make you an offer. Come on what do you want?” To which May replies “make me an offer”. According to an account by ITV’s Robert Peston, Merkel had reporters “laughing uproariously”.
At least Merkel is not alone. No one in the government knows what May wants either. To most, May has no vision for Britain’s future, just a list of contradictory demands from her cabinet that she keeps putting in a drawer hoping that when she next takes it out again, they will have magically resolved themselves.
Yet there is almost no reconciling the Brexiteers’ demands, led by Boris Johnson, for a bold buccaneering Britain released from the shackles of the EU, and Philip Hammond’s suggestion last week of only “very modest” changes to the UK’s relationship with Brussels.
Hammond has told aides to prepare for an escalation in Brexit hostilities. “Philip knows it’s just going to get worse. He’s ready for that,” a Treasury source tells me. “He is just incapable of moderating what he says. He believes that he has thought all this through, and that most of the Brexiteers haven’t.”
He is said to only really respect Gove “on the other side”. Gove repaid the compliment last night, standing in for the chancellor at a Tory Reform Group event: “Let me assure you that in every area we remain highly aligned. And while he reserves the right to diverge from my position, he hasn’t yet found it necessary to contemplate moving a scintilla away from where I stand.”
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Liam Fox uses an interview in The Sun to tell hardline Tory Eurosceptics they will have to “live with disappointment” and accept a softer Brexit. Iain Duncan Smith told the Today programme that the cabinet should “say a little less” and let May get on with it.
Hammond is right about one thing. It is about to get worse. Secret government analysis, leaked to Buzzfeed, suggests Britain would be worse off outside the EU in every scenario. Based on Treasury figures and compiled by the Brexit Department, the papers suggest economic growth will be between 2 and 8 per cent lower over the next 15 years. This will not endear Hammond to the Brexiteers.
At just after 5pm yesterday, the power crisis spread to the Treasury. The lamps are going out all over May’s premiership. Shall we see them lit again?