Being British prime minister is a thankless job at the moment. Just ask Theresa May, soon to depart 10 Downing Street. May spent two years trying to work out how Britain should leave the European Union, only to have her Brexit deal defeated three times by Parliament — with many in her own party refusing to back her.
May made her resignation as leader of the Conservative Party official Friday. She’ll stay on as prime minister until her party can choose a replacement. But it remains unclear if any of the candidates have a real plan to deal with Britain’s Brexit crisis. Indeed, some candidates could be expected to add to the chaos, rather than subtract from it.
The names of 10 candidates were released Monday. Some on the list, like Boris Johnson, are familiar characters in Brexit politics. Once the mayor of London and foreign secretary, Johnson is known for, among other things, being left dangling on a zip-line and saying women wearing burqas and niqabs looked like “bank robbers.” He is currently the bookmakers’ favorite to win.
Johnson’s closest rivals have slightly less extensive résumés of gaffes. There’s Jeremy Hunt, the foreign secretary who mistakenly told Chinese officials that his Chinese-born wife was Japanese, and Andrea Leadsom, former leader of the House of Commons, who dropped out of the 2016 leadership race after suggesting she had more stake in Britain’s future because she was a mother. (May has expressed regret she was not able to have children.)
Environment Secretary Michael Gove has more than one cross to bear: Not only have photographs of him drinking glasses of water been going viral for years, but he is now dealing with the admission that he used cocaine a number of times in the past. Another candidate, MP and former soldier Rory Stewart, went further — expressing remorse over smoking opium while in Iran.
Home Secretary Sajid Javid, former Brexit secretary Dominic Raab, Health Secretary Matt Hancock, and fellow members of parliament Mark Harper and Esther McVey are the other candidates.
With this relatively broad array of contenders and ample time for campaigning, you might expect some fresh ideas on Brexit. All candidates are adamant that they want Brexit, though there are certainly divides in how they’re pledging to undertake the biggest task facing Britain today, and none of their ideas are particularly inspiring.
McVey, a former television presenter turned politician, favors the hardest Brexit of all, according to the Guardian. She wants to leave Europe without a withdrawal agreement, leading to the dreaded “no deal” Brexit that some economists have warned would be economically disastrous. One reporter dubbed McVey’s kamikaze strategy as a “Thelma & Louise Brexit.”
Esther McVey comes out swinging for Thelma & Louise Brexit – drive straight off the cliff in a blaze of glory. The toughest 'no deal' pitch yet. But she's going to face some roadblocks…https://t.co/QdoSAEF3ff
— James Rothwell (@JamesERothwell) May 29, 2019
McVey may be the only candidate who openly favors a no-deal Brexit over a deal, but others aren’t far off. Raab, the former Brexit secretary, has suggested dissolving Parliament to stop any law that could block or delay Britain’s exit from the E.U. without a deal. That idea angers some Conservatives, however, as they say it would involve the queen in Brexit.
Johnson, the favorite, has his own tough idea: withholding the $50 billion Britain agreed to pay the E.U. when it voted to leave. Johnson told the Sunday Times this weekend that money was a “great solvent and a great lubricant” in getting a deal. European officials, however, say such a plan would be illegal and amount to a sovereign debt default.
Of the 10 candidates, only two have ruled out a no-deal Brexit. Stewart, an unorthodox candidate who once wrote a book about walking around war-torn Afghanistan, is an outlier in that he publicly favors a softer Brexit that would involve a customs union. The one potential candidate who favored a second referendum on the terms of leaving the E.U., MP Sam Gyimah, dropped out on Monday.
This might seem surprising, given the high levels of support for a second referendum among the British public. But the next prime minister of Britain is being decided by an internal party mechanism, not a nationwide election. Conservative lawmakers will begin a series of votes Thursday designed to weed out all but two candidates, who would then go to party members for a postal vote.
This means any would-be conservative prime minister’s campaign won’t be directed at the country but at the party’s base. There are only 160,000 or so Conservative Party members in Britain. They tend to be older, richer and more conservative (with a small c) than the average voter. They also tend to support Brexit more.
Candidates have reason to worry about this part of the electorate, especially given the drubbing that the Conservative Party received in recent European Parliament elections, where it won just four seats, a loss of 15. The Brexit Party, founded only months ago by anti-E.U. campaigner Nigel Farage, won 29.
But the Brexit Party is still essentially a protest party. The Conservatives, on the other hand, are one of Britain’s two major parties, with a history that dates back almost two centuries and bears decades of institutional experience governing. However, hearing the candidates this week, many observers said they were struck by how out of touch with reality they were — and not just on Brexit, but also on issues like taxes and abortion.
These far-fetched policy ideas, combined with the lack of broader popular support for some of the candidates, have given the contest a surreal, somewhat hallucinogenic edge. Faisal Islam, former political editor of Sky News, likened the battle of different ideas to a steeplechase of unicorns — with no drug tests, of course.
Actually, probably more like a unicorn Grand National without dope tests… Narco-cism
— Faisal Islam (@faisalislam) June 10, 2019
Others view it in less whimsical terms: The Financial Times’s Robert Shrimsley described a tendency toward “militancy” that is helping to threaten Britain’s very electoral system. Certainly, the contest to replace May as Britain’s prime minister is looking less like a battle of ideas that could lift up Britain — and more like a race to the bottom.
| • Readers may recall a video from Jerusalem that showed a group of women showing off their bras in a bid to stop a protest by ultra-Orthodox men who were angry at businesses being open on the Jewish Sabbath. The video was a neat encapsulation of life in a city where religious conservatives abut young liberal life.
But Loveday Morris and Miriam Berger dug deeper, finding not only a quirk of life in Jerusalem but also a story that “reflected a central tension in modern Israel over the very nature of the state, founded by secular Zionists but with an ultrareligious population that is growing in size and influence.” It’s a tension that came to the fore politically in recent months, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to combine secular and religious factions to form a governing majority in parliament, but failed — prompting new elections. • The Post’s Chico Harlan and Stefano Pitrelli have been corresponding with Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a retired Vatican ambassador to Washington who wrote a letter calling on Pope Francis to resign. Viganò went into hiding nine months ago after accusing the Pope of tolerating a known sexual abuser. In his first extended interview since then, he sent my colleagues 8,000 words in response to nearly 40 questions. « The signs I see are truly ominous,” Viganò wrote. “Not only is Pope Francis doing close to nothing to punish those who have committed abuse, he is doing absolutely nothing to expose and bring to justice those who have, for decades, facilitated and covered up the abusers.” • Remember that friendship tree that Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron planted? It died. James McAuley writes: « The small oak, which came from the historic Belleau Wood to the east of Paris, where American forces halted a German counteroffensive in the waning months of World War I, was a gift from Macron to Trump during his April 2018 state visit. “As Macron wrote on Twitter at the time, the tree ‘will be a reminder at the White House of these ties that bind us.’ Instead, the dead tree can now be seen as a reminder of an amicable relationship that began as ‘le bromance’ and has since become rather antagonistic.” • Thomas Erdbrink, the New York Times correspondent in Iran and a former Post correspondent, has not been able to report in the country for the past four months after his press credentials were revoked in February without explanation. Upon hearing the news, many observers noted that Erdbrink had a nuanced and thoughtful view of Iran that went deeper than most. For a taste of that, try reading one of his most recent articles from February before his credentials were revoked, which looked at how the Iran was changing four decades after the 1979 revolution. He wrote of how, despite its theocratic laws, Iran was slowly becoming a “normal” country, citing nose rings, Valentine’s Day and Instagram as evidence. « Iran’s leaders face a growing dilemma of whether to start translating the social changes into new laws and customs,” Erdbrink wrote, “or try to hang on to the 40-year-old ideals of the revolution.”
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