The Brexit Disaster: A Tale of Five Prime Ministers

As the final rites are played out, Chris Painter assesses the procession of Conservative Premierships since 2010 and their failure to articulate any coherent political project

If Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities we have a tale of five Prime Ministers, as the final rites of a third era of protracted continuous Conservative rule since 1951 are played out.

The first period, lasting until 1964, operated largely within the post-1945 consensus established by Attlee’s Labour Governments. The second, beginning in 1979, tore apart that consensus.

The current hegemony ends with a Conservative Prime Minister trying to compensate for the chaos engendered by his predecessors, the final act in a procession encompassing David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and now Rishi Sunak. 

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Delivering Brexit

David Cameron was elected as Leader of the Conservative Party in 2005, selected for his Blair-like modernising credentials, just as Edward Heath was chosen in 1965 as a centre-right equivalent of then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. Despite Gordon Brown’s struggles in Downing Street, Cameron failed to win outright in the 2010 general election. He negotiated a Coalition with right-inclined ‘Orange Book Liberals’ which, though tempering its more extreme manifestations, provided no real obstacle to making austerity a defining feature of his 2010-15 Administration.

With lasting damage inflicted on the public realm, Cameron’s dilettante style of governing also allowed his Home Secretary, Theresa May, to introduce a hostile migrant regime, albeit with little to show by way of statistical trends.

That provided an opportunity for even more divisive policies propagated from the Faragist Right. It led, of course, to Cameron’s ill-conceived promise of an in-out EU referendum which, despite profound economic and constitutional repercussions, contained no additional safeguards over and above the requirement for a simple country-wide majority. Thus, the scene was set for his ignominious resignation in 2016 after an unexpected election victory the previous year.

Theresa May, his successor, secured the Conservative Party leadership literally as the last candidate standing, because of post-referendum animosity between leading Brexit campaigners, Michael Gove and Boris Johnson.

She and her advisers latched onto the electoral possibilities of an economic interventionist-socially conservative platform. But instead of a ‘soft’ Brexit, which stood a chance of re-uniting the country after the bitterness of the referendum result, she immediately started drawing negotiating red lines, much to the dismay of a number of her Cabinet colleagues. Freedom of movement became a prime target, as one might expect from the architect of a hostile environment. 

Two developments left her Premiership in ruins. Firstly, there was the botched election in 2017, when she deprived her party of its parliamentary majority. Secondly, as the importance of maintaining frictionless trade with