Theresa may

An awful lot of Theresa May’s resignation honours list is awful. In no particular order: Knighting Geoff Boycott would be a horrible act for any PM, let alone one who actually did some good on domestic violence. Who cares if he punched a woman repeatedly in the face, he played great cricket, eh? A gruesome choice, even though he continues to deny the offence. Knighting the communications Director who failed to communicate your central policy would be a misjudgement at the best of times. But Theresa May adds hypocrisy to the mix: she once cruelly and very publicly mocked David Cameron’s press chief for precisely the same honour.

Boris Johnson has already decided on his election message: vote for me and get Brexit, vote for anyone else and get Jeremy Corbyn. He will ask voters: who can you imagine negotiating best with Brussels? Me, or Corbyn? Clear as the message may be, the Prime Minister is risking everything in this contest. He could lose it all: Brexit, his premiership, the party, the works. He could go down in history as the shortest-lived occupant of No. 10. Or he could win, take this country out of the EU, then realign and reshape British politics. As one of those intimately involved in the decision to go for an election puts it: ‘It is a massive gamble. Nobody knows how it will pan out.’ One secretary of state admits that the outcome of the election is ‘totally unknowable.

As was to be expected, the EU’s reaction to Boris Johnson’s offer of revisiting the Withdrawal Agreement if the backstop is removed has been to reject it out of hand. But there are still 68 days to go before the UK is due to leave the EU and if the EU’s resolve wavers between now and then, Boris’s high-risk strategy could come back to haunt him. Reading Martin Howe’s evisceration of the Withdrawal Agreement, one is reminded of Jerome K Jerome’s visit to the doctor in Three Men in a Boat. Rather than explaining that he was suffering from the symptoms of pretty much every disease known to mankind, J found it easier to tell his doctor the one thing that was not wrong with him: housemaid’s knee.

Theresa May spent her first day outside of No. 10 at Lord's cricket ground, watching the second day of the England match against Ireland. The game proved portentous, with Ireland squaring up to presumed English supremacy before the match was called off due to an imminent storm, all while May and her allies watched from the sidelines. Mr S will resist making any comparison to May's political career... May's trip, alongside her former chief-of-staff Gavin Barwell and ex-ministers Greg Clark and David Gauke, was no doubt a much-needed outing. However, a search of the register of members' interests reveals this particular jolly didn't come cheap. Both May and Gauke each received two tickets from the England and Wales Cricket Board, totalling a cool £1,200.

In his very long letter to Jeremy Corbyn about why, after all, he will stay out of the Labour party instead of fighting his expulsion, Alastair Campbell complains that Britain has been the victim of a ‘right-wing coup’. Boris Johnson’s government has no ‘real democratic mandate’, he says, and Mr Corbyn should be fighting it much harder. You hear this argument a lot — we have a new prime minister and so we must have a general election. In my lifetime (born 1956), seven prime ministers — Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Callaghan, Major, Brown, May and Johnson — have come into office without a general election before or immediately ensuing; in that sense, without a democratic mandate.

Losing confidence The government may soon face a vote of no confidence, the second this year. How often do these votes happen — and succeed? — Since 1945, UK governments have faced votes of no confidence on 23 occasions. Only one of these has been successful — when Jim Callaghan lost by a single vote on 28 March 1979, precipitating the election which brought Margaret Thatcher to power. — There have been 24 successful votes of no confidence in history, 13 of which were in the latter half of the 19th century. — Since 1900 there have been only three — that in 1979, and two in 1924 which brought down Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald respectively.

I am about to go to Buckingham Palace to tender my resignation to Her Majesty the Queen and to advise her to ask Boris Johnson to form a new administration. I repeat my warm congratulations to Boris on winning the Conservative leadership election. I wish him and the Government he will lead every good fortune in the months and years ahead. Their successes will be our country’s successes, and I hope that they will be many. Their achievements will build on the work of nearly a decade of Conservative or Conservative-led government. During that time our economy has been restored, our public services reformed, and our values defended on the world stage.

It has become something of a tradition in British politics: an incoming prime minister promises to restore proper cabinet government. They vow to go back to the good old days of NHS policy being run by the health secretary, schools policy by the education secretary — and decisions taken in open discussion with a prime minister who is first among equals. The reality, however, is that a small clique in No. 10 ends up controlling the government. Gordon Brown made a fuss about bringing back cabinet government to try to differentiate himself from Tony Blair. In a rare admission of error, Brown says in his memoirs that he failed to do so. He tried to do everything himself, with mixed results.

British law enforcement is famous around the world for its brand of neighbourhood policing. But this now exists largely in memory in the place where policing was invented. Our capability to police in this way, that has protected society since the time of Robert Peel, has all but collapsed. The only surprise about the five ex-Metropolitan Police chiefs' blistering attack on the ten years of Conservative policy that achieved this is how long it’s taken them to get their act together. For a period of time between 2009 and 2011, I had a pretty unique perspective on policing in Britain. By day I was the senior Home Office mandarin in south west England, overseeing performance on crime, drugs and counter terrorism policy.

Jeremy Corbyn took a bizarre approach to today's Prime Minister's Questions, choosing largely to have a go at the likely leader of the Liberal Democrats Jo Swinson, rather than the woman opposite him. He choose to focus his questions to Theresa May on cuts to legal aid, branding them a 'Lib Dem decision' and pointing out that Jo Swinson was the junior coalition minister who took the cuts through the Commons. It was additionally odd that Corbyn chose to talk about legal aid, given it offered a reasonably easy leap for May into the way the party is handling tonight's Panorama on anti-Semitism. But the big story of the day was Sir Kim Darroch's resignation as UK Ambassador to Washington, something Corbyn should have exploited to his advantage.

Theresa May has just a handful of days left as Prime Minister, but is still trying to secure a domestic legacy for herself. She is doing this in a last-minute manner that makes David Cameron's famous essay crises look incredibly well-organised. Last week, she called for better design rules to prevent 'tiny homes' being built, which sounded odd given as Prime Minister she could feasibly have introduced some rules herself. May would say that her beef is with local government, not her own failure, when it comes to the lack of quality in newly-built homes. Localism is very convenient when it allows you to blame someone else for not doing something.