The end of May is June

I wasn’t planning on writing another political entry just yet, but the last few days have been, well, fucking bananas.

It all started on Wednesday.  This was when Theresa May announced the timeline for the fourth vote on the Working Agreement Bill.  Yup, the one that had been voted down three times before.  This time, there was mention of a possible second referendum.

Now, the idea was that would be enough to get MP’s to support the bill.  That idea kinda failed miserably.  The killing blow was delivered by Andrea Leadsom.  Her position in the cabinet was Leader of the House and part of her responsibilities was to introduce bills.  Well, she resigned Wednesday night, on the basis that she did not want to introduce a bill to the House that she does not support.

Meanwhile, the 1922 committee, the people who kinda really run the Tories, had a couple of votes about changing the process for changing leaders and sealed the results in envelopes.  These would not be opened until today, if needed.

Yesterday was, of course, the EU elections.  Not much to talk about here, the results won’t be announced until Sunday night at the earliest and the count hasn’t happened yet.  The reason for that is that the rest of the EU isn’t voting until Sunday where we vote on Thursdays for tradition reasons (I actually know why Thursday was chosen and it’s fucking ridiculous)and we can’t announce until the rest of the EU votes.

Now, it’s expected that the Brexit Party will win the most seats* of any single party.  Does that show that the people of the UK still want Brexit?  Eeeh.  It’s not about the number of seats, it’s about the vote share.  If, and only if, they get a bigger vote share than the pro-Remain, pro-Peoples Vote parties.

How likely is that?  Eeeh.  There’s three parties we’re talking about here.  The SNP are the single biggest party in the Scottish Parliament and have the biggest number of Scottish MP’s in Westminster.  The problem is if enough union supporting Scots were willing to vote for them.  The green Party are on a surge at the moment.  And the Lib Dems are the biggest Remain party in the UK and are also on a surge.  I really doubt the Brexit Party will get a bigger vote share than all three.

Then, today.  Theresa may had a meeting with the leader of the 1922 committee.  Afterwords, she spoke outside 10 Downing Street where she announced she was standing down as leader of the Tory Party as of June 7 (meaning she doesn’t get out of the State visit by the Dorito Benito for 3 – 5 June) and will remain as PM (as she has to) until her replacement has been found.

Now, there are those who say she had a difficult job to do, and that’s certainly true.  But, she did that difficult job awfully.  Between triggering Article 50 with no actual plan, the very badly timed General Election, the red lines, the refusal to compromise, “no deal is better than a bad deal” and generally messing about, it was bad.  She wasn’t that good elsewhere as well.  It’s telling that the thing that, apparently, almost made her cry in her speech wasn’t the damage that’s been done to the country, but the end of her career.

So, who is next?  To be blunt, no-one good.  The bookies favourite is Boris Johnson.  That would be the worse possible outcome.

Course, the problem for the next PM is that they’ll need to hold a General Election.  There’s no way to get any sort of deal through this Parliament, so it’ll have to be done.

Problem is, that’ll likely to be the end of their Premiership.

Will

*Technically not seats, as we use a system called D’Hondt for these elections.  But it’s easier to just say seats