Tomorrow marks a year since Theresa May sat her dejected parliamentary party down and promised that ‘I got us into this mess and I’ll get us out of it’. She was speaking amid the chaos of the snap election that she’d called, and it wasn’t clear whether the Prime Minister was going to be able to form a government, let alone survive as leader for very long. Tonight, she’s still here but still appealing to Conservative MPs for unity as the ‘crunch stage’ of the EU withdrawal bill arrives in the Commons.
The briefing over the weekend did suggest that the Prime Minister was probably going to be ok, though in reality there are still a couple of votes that are going to be, at the very least, rather tight. But this is still a surprising place for May to be in at all: few would really have expected that she’d still have enough authority to be looking at tight votes in the Commons at all.
This is not so much May’s own achievement in party management – we saw last week as ministers erupted in fury that they had been cut out of key documents regarding the Brexit backstop that May does still retain the bad habits she developed at the Home Office of cutting people out of important decisions – as it is an achievement of the party itself.
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