Pretty much all the bad things that people are saying today about Theresa May are true. She’s bad at politics, bad at communicating, bad at dealing with colleagues.
She created the conditions that made her job as prime minister handling Brexit almost impossible. Her ‘red lines’ in the autumn of 2016 gave Britain almost no room for manoeuvre and made the sort of cross-party consensus approach to Brexit that is the logical response to a 52:48 referendum result practically impossible.
Her 2017 general election cost her the Commons majority that might just have made that hardline approach viable. Her response was quintessentially Theresa May: she compromised on policy but not on politics.
When you hear people today scoffing that May didn’t do compromise, they’re wrong. She did compromise and in a very big way. She just didn’t tell anybody.
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