Last week Yvette Cooper summed up what I have thought about Theresa May since the referendum.
To a packed House of Commons, Ms Cooper nailed a grim looking prime minister when she said: “In calling for a snap election you accused parliament of blocking Brexit but three quarters of MPs and two thirds of the House of Lords voted for Article 50. So that wasn’t true was it? A month ago she told her official spokesperson to rule out a general election. That is also now untrue. She (the PM) wants us to believe that she is a woman of her word but the truth is we can’t believe a single word she says!”
Quite simply I don’t believe a single word uttered by Theresa May either. She hid behind Cameron and Osborne during the referendum and then transformed chameleon like into a champion for Brexit when the vote was in. In the week when the prime minister’s red box should have been bulging with issues over the future of Gibraltar, the uncertainty of Brexit, the estrangement of Scotland and the collapse of the Northern Ireland peace talks, this provincial parson's daughter was pontificating about Cadbury’s dropping ‘Easter’ from their eggs.
Did she forget she isn’t the Archbishop of Canterbury? Did she not notice that unlike the Queen she is not the head of the Anglican Church? Did she consider that she is the secular head of a government in a multi-cultural society?
No of course she didn’t. Mrs May is a little Englander whose world revolves around a Britain straight from the set of Ealing Studios. A place populated with doughty dowagers like Margaret Rutherford, caddish toffs played by Terry-Thomas and silver-tongued charmers such as Leslie Phillips. No doubt she and Mr May are the sort that lament the non-playing of ‘The Queen’ in cinemas.
Of course, Mrs May’s new boldness in calling for an election has not been brought about by her Boadicea-like leadership. No, it’s been a gift from the Labour Party in the form of their lamentable and lacklustre leader Jeremy Corbyn that has made Mistress May step forth. Corbyn and his slapstick sidekicks, McDonnell and Abbott, are to the Labour movement what avian flu is to the poultry industry. Their lack of credibility amongst the British voting public is so toxic that even if Jesus Christ came back he couldn’t resurrect the Labour party from the doldrums.
As for Northern Ireland, surprise to say, we didn’t even factor into Downing Street’s vision of Team GB when calling the election.
However, one positive post the election outcome is that Mrs May is unlikely to beholden to the histrionics of the DUP. Secure with a new healthy mandate, the Tories will feel no need for garden party soirees with DUP backwoodsmen.
Of course no sooner had an election been called than there were the usual sectarian catcalls by unionists. Some who seem incapable of making their own cogent party political arguments pleaded for pacts within unionism. This well trodden path fosters the current ‘them versus us’ divisions that blinkers unionist and indeed nationalist voters from thinking for themselves. It’s a herd driven mentality that is worthy of both Trump and Putin.
Each time unionist leaders call for such political unity, the demands for reciprocal arrangements between nationalist parties grow. They should be resisted. Yet it looks as though some cracks are appearing in the will power of some in the SDLP leadership to abandon that position. Unionists demean politics and themselves by their pacts-which is solely about keeping nationalists out - whether that is in South Belfast or Fermanagh/ South Tyrone.
Already some are calling this the Brexit election and therefore the argument goes that we need strong representative voices in Westminster to reflect the majority in Northern Ireland who voted to Remain in the EU. That’s a sentiment with which one could agree but unlike a PR election it now means leap-frogging one’s own party preference for another political party and that’s a big ask.
West Belfast - the lynchpin of Sinn Féin power - had one of the lowest turnouts in the referendum and SF remains hogtied to their abstentionist stance of boycotting Westminster.
If this is a Brexit election then surely the place for voicing Remain concerns is at Parliament, not fog horning them through the media across the Irish Sea?
Pragmatism may edge out principle in this election and if it does the blame lies squarely with Theresa May.
