Thursday 1 June 2017

Is This a Cunning Tory Plan?

Theresa May is asking people to believe in her because she believes in Brexit, whereas Jeremy Corbyn does not.

Do people believe in her Brexit plan, the 12-point plan that she outlined in January this year? Apprently they don't. I have just voted in a Daily Telegraph poll, declaring that I do not believe she will be able to achieve any of the items on her wish list, for that is what it reads like. Intrestingly, I was promptly informed that 51 per cent of the people who had voted didn't think she would or could achieve her ultimate exit Brexit either. 

Mrs May probably knows this, which may explain why she goes on addressing what looks like small groups of placard-bearing offspring of Daily Telegraph readers. In an outfit seemingly inspired by Sydney Opera House and the memory of female power-dressing in the 1980s, she bounced her Brexit message about as though she was leading a fitness exercise at a Sunday School meeting.

Is this all part of a cunning plan to lose the General Election to the Labour Party? You never know. Labour, unlike the Conservatives, has not been mandated to take the UK out of the European Union via Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. Their policy is to stay in the Single Market while negotiating the UK's gradual withdrawal from the political structure of the EU, with its single currency, federal foreign policy and European defence force. 

I imagine that most middle-of-the-road Tories, not obsessed by immigration, wish that was their party's policy. Well, they know now how they can achieve that on June 8. There is historical precedent for this. Before the February 1974 General Election, former Tory Cabinet Minister Enoch Powell MP encouraged fellow Conservatives to vote Labour, which was then opposed to the UK's memberhsip of the exclusive Brussels club. The Tories were defeated.

Handy dandy, how things turn around. Next week Conservatives should vote Labour if they want to keep the UK as a trading partner in the European Union's Single Market.

Either accidentally or cunningly covertly, Mrs May, long a campaigning Remainer, has single-handedly brought about this state of affairs. Her rather forced, stage-managed public appearances, in contrast make Jeremy Corbyn's look a little more relaxed, even to the bearded wonder taking time out to wax lyrical to ITV's Robert Peston about the stress-reducing pleasures of tending his allotment.  

In what amounts to a complete change of climate, more tangible than President Trump's public coitus interruptus from the Paris Climate Change Agreement, reporters are now considering seriously the possibility of a porridge-eating Arsenal supporter in 10 Downing Street on June 9.

In the words of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - it was fifty years ago today - "I've got to admit it's getting better/ A little better all the time (it can't get much worse..").

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