British politics reminds me of a Land Rover stuck in a field: the wheels are spinning, mud is flying everywhere, but there seems to be no possibility of moving forward. Theresa May somehow manages to be both reckless and cautious – which is almost impressive until you remember that she can’t even get two dozen of her own party, sitting at the same cabinet table, to agree what the Brexit end-state should be. Instead, the Tory party indulges itself in therapeutic infighting and preparations for the next leadership race. It has learned absolutely nothing from the referendum campaign, which was seen through the psychodrama of Dave vs Boris, a rivalry dating back to their school days. (I suppose it’s part of a grand British tradition that the EU referendum was lost on the playing fields of Eton.)

Not that Labour is any more inspirational. Its tactic seems to be, to borrow a phrase from Johnson, to wait for “the ball to come loose from the back of the scrum”. In other words: hang on for a Corbyn government. But that isn’t good enough. There might be four years of this parliament left to run, and all the indications are that the economy will get worse, wages will stay stagnant, homelessness will continue to rise, prisons will remain dangerously overcrowded, the transport network will continue to crumble, the NHS will gasp desperately for more money and we still won’t build enough bloody houses. This is no time to tend to the allotment and wait for your turn to come.

With noble exceptions such as Anna Soubry, most Tory MPs are keeping quiet about the disaster they think is coming because they are afraid of their voters. The bulk of Labour’s parliamentary party is keeping quiet about still thinking Jeremy Corbyn is hopeless because they are afraid of their activists. Corbyn himself talks relentlessly about a “jobs-first Brexit” to disguise the fact he’s fine with pretty much any kind of Brexit. (He knows that, unlike him, the majority of Labour members, as well as Labour voters, are pro-European.) May pretends that Liam Fox is the best choice for the job of trade secretary, when the truth is that his globe-trotting pointlessness represents nothing more than appeasement. And if Rees-Mogg enters the next Tory leadership race as the favourite, how many of his colleagues in parliament will have the courage to say to the swooning Conservative grassroots: we’ve seen him up close and you’re making a big mistake?

I’ve been writing about politics for seven years now, and it’s double that since I first became politically active thanks to the disastrous Iraq War. In that time, I’ve never felt so depressed about my country and the quality of the people who want to lead it. Previous governments in my adult lifetime have been variously wrong, and cruel, and misguided, and deluded, and complacent. But I can’t remember a time when Britain’s problems seemed so large and the politicians confronting them felt so small.

Theresa May has conceded her party was not ready when she called a snap general election in which the Conservatives lost their majority despite a hefty lead in opinion polls.

The prime minister said she had failed to communicate the message she gave on the steps of Downing Street after winning the Tory leadership last year, and that her words about making the country work for everyone “didn’t come through in the election".

The prime minister hinted that she believed there had been too much top-down control in the campaign, which delivered the Tories a net loss of 13 seats and forced May to strike a pact with the DUP in order to remain in power.


“There weren’t the links with the centre [of the party] that there should have been. That’s one of the issues we need to look at,” she said.