The lack of talent starts at the top. To lead a country you need a degree of vision, a great deal of energy and determination and the ability to inspire those around you with the confidence that you can do the job. May seems to lack all three of the necessary skills. It isn’t easy to inspire people and to lead with energy when your only strategy is to cling on and hope for the best.
May has stitched together a cabinet not on the basis of who is best for the job but on the principle that if she has one person from one faction then she must try and balance it out with someone from another. The consequence is a cabinet stuffed full of people whose main ability is to represent a factional view. Genuinely capable people like Anna Soubry or Nicki Morgan are way out in the cold. An amateur diving contestant is in.
It is easy to see why Pritti Patel had to be got rid of. Much harder to understand why she was initially appointed. She has a long track record of concealing the truth and bizarre political opinions. She lied to May about her meetings with Israel even during a meeting May had organised to tell her off for previously lying about exactly the same thing. That is an exceptionally stupid thing to do. Almost as stupid and arrogant as meeting with Israeli Defence staff and telling them that people in the UK would love to see them spending some of our aid money on all the wonderful humanitarian work they were doing.
Instead of looking around for the most talented replacement May was forced to look for a like for like one. She found the perfect choice in Penny Mordaunt. Just as far right. Just as arrogant. And every bit as accomplished a liar. Mordaunt was the woman who insisted during the referendum campaign that the UK was powerless to stop Turkey joining the EU. Either she knew we had a veto and was deliberately lying or she is too stupid to be a Minister.
Then there is Boris Johnson. It is possible that May appointed him to Foreign Secretary because she thought he was the right man for the job. If so then she is to blame for not realising he was completely incapable of controlling his own outpourings. Something which is very dangerous in a Foreign Secretary. It has certainly proved a very bad appointment for one lonely British woman stuck in an Iranian jail. It is also possible that May thoroughly understood Johnson’s limitations before she appointed him and that was exactly why she gave him the job. Giving someone the post of Foreign Secretary when you know they are incapable of the maturity that post requires is the ideal way of finishing off an opponent. Is that why he got the job? Is that why she’s keeping him on so long?
Even the supposedly steady hands in the Cabinet have let her down. She wanted Hammond to deliver a bit of common sense as Chancellor. Instead he has tinkered about ineptly whilst refusing to face up to the need to prepare seriously for the most intense economic challenge the country has faced in decades. What kind of mind thinks it is unwise to spend any money on preparing for the possibility of a hard Brexit? What possesses anyone to think that a collapse of the negotiations is an impossible outcome of the mess we are currently in? Or to think that we could sort it out in a few weeks if the negotiations fail? Hammond is supposed to be our serious economic manager, preparing us to face the future with a strong and successful economy. Where is the well thought out forward looking strategy to help that economy change rapidly enough? All he seems capable of producing is the most vapid and uninspiring jumbles of ill thought out ideas and some sound bites about this representing a strategy. Rarely can a Chancellor have had more difficulty understanding that you don’t create a strategy by putting the word on the cover of a White Paper. You create a strategy by having a clear vision for what Britain needs to be like in the future and a road map of how to get there.
Talking of which brings us to David Davis. Our serious grown up EU negotiator. The man May picked to steer us through all the complexity and deliver a smooth Brexit. Or alternatively the failure that she brought back from obscurity in order to balance out her appointment of Hammond. To give him his due Davis does seem to be devoting his full talents to the job. He just doesn’t have enough of them. The EU outflanked him completely by insisting that the UK must agree to pay up on its obligations before they would start talking properly about trade. They have also outflanked him by asking from the start that he should solve the impossible problem of Northern Ireland’s borders. Davis can’t work out how Northern Ireland can have UK tariffs without having a customs border with the Republic. He also can’t work out how to provide free movement over a border with Ireland without stopping free movement over a border with the wider UK. Yet it has to be admitted that Davis wasn’t outflanked on the 3rd condition of the talks. He messed that up all on his own. Refusing to give guarantees to EU nationals who have been living here for years was not a necessary strategy or a wise one economically. It was simply an act of political cowardice from someone terrified of losing his core far right support base.
So we have a Cabinet full of incompetents who seem to be taking it in turns to resign in disgrace. Reluctantly. Too late. After their incompetence or venality has caused huge damage to May, the Conservatives and the country. And when each one goes May is left to desperately find a like for like political close. Regardless of talent.
Rarely can a Prime Minister have been so weak. She lurches on week by week accumulating fresh problems, getting closer and closer to a really dangerous deadline, and waiting for the next scandal to hit home. The only reason she hasn’t been ditched is that her party hasn’t got a good alternative. They are terrified of a new election and they know they couldn’t agree on who would replace her. So we are all left watching our screens wondering what the next disaster will be. And how a government of none of the talents will deal with it.