25 May 2019

Anne Perkins - Adios Theresa May

From Saturday Morning, 9:04 am on 25 May 2019

Theresa May's tenure as British prime minister was the most painful veteran political columnist Anne Perkins has seen.

Perkins is a political commentator, writer and broadcaster, and the former deputy political editor of The Guardian.

She discusses British PM Theresa May’s announcement that she will resign on 7 June, and what’s next for the ruling Conservative Party following her departure with Noelle McCarthy.

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Photo: AFP

On a painful three years:

"It must have been the three most painful years for any Prime Minister in modern history. Apart from a brief and glorious honeymoon, which fell horribly to the ground, in June 2017, when she decided to have a general election and succeeded only in losing her majority, she has looked the most anguished, unhappy, miserable, misfitting Prime Minister that I've ever seen on the steps of Downing Street."

On Boris Johnson:

"The smart money is indeed on him for various reasons. The way the Tory election system works, the Tory members, now a very diminished band, about as influential as a mahjong club probably, less than 100,000 people will actually choose who the leader is going to be."

Anne Perkins

Anne Perkins Photo: Guardian

"He's playing a much more careful hand than usual. And we've seen over the last months since he resigned as foreign secretary a different kind of Boris emerging, shorter hair for starters and less weight, and much, much more circumspect in his public utterances. Nonetheless, he has a single message, and one that, you know, certainly his wing of the Conservative Party will like, which is that he wants a deal, but in order to get a deal, you have to prepare for no deal, and he could live with no deal. And I think the most important thing he said in Switzerland today was that the UK would be out of the EU by October."

On Johnson's popularity in the shires:

"I think the single biggest reason why Tory MPs are likely to, through gritted teeth, let him onto that ballot paper that goes out to the Tory membership grassroots membership as the one of the final two, is because they, however much they hate him, they also acknowledge he is the man most likely to hold their seat against any kind of Corbyn surge."

Boris Johnson pictured in March 2018

Photo: AFP

On Theresa May’s legacy:

"The fact that the European elections are being held at all, when she'd absolutely promised that they wouldn't be, and then the fact that in this withdrawal agreement bill, which was the proximate cause of her downfall, she actually put in a clause suggesting that the government would make it possible for there to be a second referendum on Brexit, which was an absolute anathema to a significant number of Tory MPs - and indeed to the wider Tory party."