The Maybot 3000

Had Theresa May won the election with the landslide she expected, she’d have fired several of the cabinet with her trademark brutality. They knew who they were. And last Monday, three of them took the opportunity to tell the Prime Minister where she had gone wrong. In the first meeting of the political cabinet since she blew her party’s majority, Philip Hammond asked why there had been no economic message in the campaign. Andrea Leadsom said that while May had repeatedly claimed the election was all about Brexit, she had never said what Brexit was actually for. The most pointed contribution, though, came from Sajid Javid, who lambasted the high-handed way that May’s team had run No. 10.

However, this was ritual humiliation, not a mutiny. The Tories have decided to keep Theresa May who, in turn, has agreed to the departure of her two chiefs of staff, Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy. She knows, as her cabinet knows, that she has just committed the greatest unforced error in modern political history. In normal circumstances, she would be gone. But the Conservative party is in shock, petrified of another election and fearful that Jeremy Corbyn could become prime minister. Instead of deposing May straight away, they are going to try to reprogram her: to make her a different kind of politician.

Aside from the total collapse in May’s authority, the biggest change prompted by this general election is in the Tories’ attitude to Jeremy Corbyn. He used to be a figure of ridicule — and hope — for them. He was the great loser, the man who had captured the Labour party and rendered it unelectable for a generation. How things change. From the cabinet down, Tories are now worried that Corbyn is in a position to win an election. ‘The Tory party’s one job is to keep the hard left out — and we are about to fail at that,’ says one influential Tory MP.