With her head erect and her voice certain, Theresa May stared down the barrel of the TV cameras and spelled out to a captivated nation precisely why she is doomed.
It was a message delivered with steely determination, but it was the same message she has delivered time and time again. It is the one that has brought us to this point, and will not bring us very much further.
“I will contest this vote with everything I’ve got,” she said. But what has she got? A bitterly divided party. An even more bitterly divided country. And an unquestionable determination to get through parliament a Brexit deal that she cannot put before it.
Statements outside the door of 10 Downing Street are meant to be moments of great national importance. In two and a half years it has felt like she has given one almost every week, and they have scarcely changed.
“I stood to be leader because I believe in the Conservative vision of a better future,” she said. And she meant it. But every Conservative prime minister has believed in the Conservative vision of a better future. But no Conservative prime minister before her has inherited the job from another Conservative prime minister who has decided, of his own volition, that he cannot deliver a better future.
The country has voted for a worse future, one that she warned them not to.
“The British people want us to get on with it,” she said. “They want us to build a stronger economy.”
But vast numbers of the British people simply don’t want to get on with it. Whether it is more than 50 per cent is almost a matter of faith, but it is not far off. And of those that do want to get on with it, large numbers of those gladly accept, as Nigel Farage does, that it involves building a worse economy, and it’s a price they are willing to pay.
She has preached that no deal is better than a bad deal. And now her enemies have swept in and stolen her word. They are selling the virtues of no deal, an outcome with no virtues at all, and she has rolled the pitch for them.
She lowered her voice for her sternest warning of all. A new leader would not be in place by 27 January. A new leader, therefore, “would have to rescind or delay Article 50. It would risk no Brexit at all".
Rescinding Article 50 is the precise instruction a previous Conservative prime minister, John Major, gave yesterday on the front page of a newspaper edited by a former Conservative Chancellor. Now, it is badged up outside 10 Downing Street as a grave warning to force her own MPs into line.
The beginning of the end of May came two and half years ago, at the very beginning. Today may not formally be the end of the end. But it has been over for some time.
The Independent has launched its #FinalSay campaign to demand that voters are given a voice on the final Brexit deal.
Sign our petition here
