A soft' Brexit may be the only option

“Abusers and accusers
The voices of dismay
In waters of oblivion
Let the fountains play…”
 — From Hunji The German Sardar by Bachchoo

The rule of Theresa May hangs by a slender thread and her prime ministership by a string no thicker. There are those in her own Tory Party, which occupies 10 Downing Street as squatters till the parliamentary police comes, who are opposed to the absolute softening of her Brexit stance. These are the hard Brexiteers who want to quit the European Union’s single market and its customs’ union if that is the price of keeping all European immigrants out of the UK and unilaterally reneging on Britain’s debt to it.

The other threat from within comes from the firm Remainers, the Tory members of Parliament, numbering perhaps between 20 and 30, who didn’t want to leave the European Union for sound financial, diplomatic and civilisational reasons, who will reject any move towards a hard Brexit. They want the Brexit negotiations to be as close as to not leaving the EU.

And then there is the Brutus gang — Boris Johnson, David Davis, Liam Fox and probably even Michael Gove and their loyal supporters — who are waiting. Boris Johnson says he is firmly behind Ms May and will not stand for leader of the party till 2019 when the Brexit negotiations are complete. What he means is he will wait and see what Britain and the Opposition parties think of the deal and will throw his hat in the ring only when he can be sure that he can represent the view that will win him an election, regardless of what that view is.

Meanwhile, if Ms May is forced out, Mr Johnson will wait for the others in the gang to offer themselves as sacrificial lambs to the butchers of uncertainty. The foolishness that women perpetrate lives after them, the sensible is often reflected in desperate Queen’s speeches to assure their survival as Prime Minister.

The Queen’s speech is delivered but not written by Her Majesty. It is the Prime Minister’s statement of intended legislation for the next year or even two. It will be debated in the chamber and subject to a vote on June 29.

Ms May, short of a majority, is relying on the 10 votes of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) of Northern Ireland to get it through. Convention demands that if she loses the Queen’s speech vote, she resigns and subsequently stands down as leader of her party (though she is not obliged to resign on suffering a parliamentary defeat).

Ms May is in desperate talks with the DUP to whom the June 8 election gave a whip hand. The two parties are still bargaining over the terms of a voting commitment.

And there’s the rub. We don’t know what the contentions within these secret negotiations are. What we do know is that the DUP, a party which relies on the vote of the Protestant population of Northern Ireland, is against the law which allows gay marriage and abortion, and has very specific demands regarding the traffic of trade and people across the very permeable land border dividing British Northern Ireland from the Irish Republic, which remains a member of the EU.

Although the DUP has not yet made any moves to curtail the rights of gay people and no such intention appears in the published Queen’s speech, its ideological stance is at variance with that of the Tory Party on several social issues — specially with that of the13 MPs of the Scottish Tory Party led by one Ruth Davidson.

Ms Davidson is herself in a gay partnership and, apart from being a charismatic leader, whose electoral charm and leadership qualities even a diehard anti-Tory can acknowledge, has made it plain that she will lead a breakaway faction if the Scottish Tories are not given the “soft Brexit” they demand.

Ms Davidson, by the way, is the one I will put my money as the next leader of the Tories if Ms May is removed. The Brutus pack will be dragged under in the wake of a Theresa shipwreck.

(I wonder if I should mortgage my house, place the bet and become a millionaire – fd. You don’t own a house so don’t get carried away- Ed.)

The Queen’s speech presented to Parliament reminds the nation of the tough-talking pub braggart who, on being invited to step outside makes a show of bravado and runs as fast as he can once outside the doors. In her manifesto, when her foolish advisers told her she was on a winning ticket, Ms May promised all sorts of tough measures.

None of them appeared in the Queen’s speech, which made no mention of a tax on old and feeble people who needed state-funded care, of a cancellation of free school meals, of a solidly hard Brexit whose main plank was “No deal is better than a bad deal!” or indeed of her manifesto promise to put a cap on energy bills.

Instead, the speech was designed to appeal to all parties of the Opposition and to the free-market Tories of her own party who vehemently oppose the latter cap, as it would stop their capitalist supplier friends from exploiting the customers. Not mentioning the cap prevents it being debated.

Even Jeremy Corbyn and the Opposition parties, who are for such a cap, can’t bring it up as an intention they would have supported.

Mr Corbyn is now behaving as though he won the election and calls his party a “government in waiting” as opposed to its former image as a crippled Opposition. The boast could become a fact even as early as the end of this month.

If the Queen’s speech, with all its ameliorative intention, fails to be voted through, the more foolish of the Brutus pack — Mr Johnson is as canny as a Heinz beans warehouse — may challenge Ms May and inherit the quagmire of a minority government.

The question remains: Does May end in June?