The road not taken | 19 July 2018

Handling Brexit was never going to be easy for Theresa May, given that the Tories have been fighting a civil war over Europe for at least a quarter of a century. But the past ten days have been so calamitous that there is a real possibility that her Chequers gambit — threatening a general election unless MPs support her watered-down version of Brexit — could lead to the fall of the government and the ceding of power to the most left-wing Labour administration in history.

The mood in Parliament is now as anarchic as it was during the last days of the Callaghan government in 1979: the Maastricht crisis in 1992 looks rather tame by comparison. Like John Major, May has resorted to trying to get through day-to-day business by threatening to turn what should be routine votes into issues of confidence. Unlike Major, she has no majority to do that.