I would love to be able to turn the clock back, put in place any of her detractors and see how well they do. No better I suspect. Time will tell as we are sort of running that experiment between now and Oct 31st. I do hope we end up with a Brexit voter in place.
OK, here is a way anybody could have done better, while delivering Brexit and staying true to the first loyalty, the Tory Party.
1. Do not invoke Article 50 until you have consensus within the Tory Party on the deal. Then you have a Tory party Brexit. She inherited a Majority Tory Parliament, remember.
2. Do not call a second election (just as you promised you wouldn’t)
3. Go to the EU and say ‘this is what we want, if that is fundamentallyunacceptable to you we will go for a no deal Brexit. If the principles are acceptable, let’s negotiate the details, the ranges, the tolerances’.
4. If the EU accept, invoke Article 50 and start the discussions. If they play silly buggers and say we can’t respond until you invoke Article 50, say you will take that as a no then.
5. If the EU says no start preparations for a no deal Brexit and invoke Article 50 when you are confident that you will be as prepared as possible within two years.
6. With the game of chicken initiated, see if the EU blinks. If it doesn’t, so be it, the UK government is pursuing a clear, agreed, and unambiguous strategy.
Away from the EU name me a single thing she has handled well, or policy area where the country is in a better place than we were in pre May. The one thing she has had personal control over for nearly ten years, as Home Secretary and PM, non EU immigration, is still rising. Windrush handled well (she created that too as Home Secretary)? Grenfell? Any progress in education, health, transport, defence, power generation? Northern Ireland in better nick now than in 2015? Division between north and south? Personal debt? British Steel? I don’t think government policy since 2016 has much to do with the high employment levels.
**** all. Empathy is the human quality I value above all others, but I have none for her. I got her measure when she called me a ‘citizen of nowhere’ within a few weeks of becoming leader. Before then I had some sympathy for her as the best of a bad bunch.
I reckon that even that piece of excrement Boris Johnson would have had this settled by now, probably in embarrassing and disastrous fashion, but at least done.