She had one job

I was watching a Canadian news program this morning in the aftermath of Theresa May's resignation announcement in London. The newscaster was talking with Professor Tim Bale from Queen Mary University of London.  After Bale had given a quick rundown on what had just happened and what might be coming next, the interviewer asked the inevitable question:  it's early days, of course, but how is history likely to treat May's tenure?

The good professor did not hold back.  May had abjectly botched the one main task she had -- delivering Brexit -- thanks in the main to her insistence on taking a totally partisan approach rather than attempting to build any sort of consensus.  Aside from Brexit, said Prof. Bale, the list of accomplishments May could point too was desperately thin. History would judge her Prime Ministership as one of the worst in UK history.

The interviewer looked genuinely shocked.  "Wow!  That's harsh", she said. Indeed it is, but can anyone say that Prof. Bale is wrong?

May grabbed the job with both hands in the aftermath of David Cameron's disastrous 2016 referendum, when the two most obvious candidates for the job -- Boris Johnson and Michael Gove -- basically knifed each other in the back. She took on the task of delivering Brexit even though she herself had been a remainer.  Instead of attempting to define Brexit in a way that might have started to reunite the country, she chose to utter the memorable but vacuous phrase -- "Brexit means Brexit" -- that came to echo through the rest of her disastrous tenure.

When May took over from Cameron, the Tory party had a majority in the House of Commons, and under the UK's freshly-minted fixed terms law, no election was required until 2019.  Instead of using her control of the Commons to move things ahead, May chose to call an early election.  This resulted in the Tories losing their majority.  In order to remain in government they were forced to make an alliance with the unlovely Democratic Unionist Party from Northern Ireland, the only political grouping in the UK that makes the Conservative Party look modern.

Hamstrung by the demands of the DUP, May set out a series of mutually incompatible "red lines" for negotiations with the EU,  Basically the UK was seeking to cherry-pick the bits of the EU relationship it liked while walking away from the rest, an approach which the EU warned from the outset would not succeed.

By the end of 2018, an exit deal of sorts was somehow cobbled together, but drew praise from almost no-one in UK politics when the details were unveiled.  May attempted, in defiance of parliamentary precedent, to ram the deal through the Commons on three separate occasions, each time meeting an ignominious defeat.  She was preparing to make a fourth attempt when her party finally managed to persuade her that the jig was up, paving the way for this morning's teary announcement.

What next?  The Tories will pick a new leader in the coming weeks.  A large number of candidates are already girding up to compete, but the race is probably Boris Johnson's to lose. The winner, whoever it may be, will be a hard Brexiteer who will undoubtedly try to get a better deal out of Brussels. There is unlikely to be much appetite for that within the EU, so the best bet is that the UK will leave the EU without a deal on October 31.  After that, just maybe, saner voices will be heard and an orderly arrangement for future relations will be drawn up.

Theresa May is perhaps not the worst UK Prime Minister ever -- David Cameron may still own that title, as the feckless dolt who triggered this whole mess.  Still, I'm with Professor Bale in stating that she will not be treated kindly by historians.  As a political obituary, this little couplet from the left-wing band Chumbawamba, now sadly broken up, is hard to beat:

"You had no friends, you won't be missed.
I'm here to tell you that you don't exist".

Pretty much.