Theresa may

Although Theresa May's premiership is now looking anything but strong and stable, the Prime Minister will be pleased to learn that one MP at least is still sticking to the script. After we learnt this morning that the Queen's Speech may be delayed as the Government tries desperately to thrash out a deal with the DUP, May's 'coalition of chaos' attack line is coming back to haunt her. While a number of Tory backbenchers have come forward to criticise her since the result, happily one MP still has her back. Step forward Alan Mak. He has been valiantly re-using May's election lines today in a bid to reassure people that things were still very much strong and stable. Mak popped up on BBC News to say that: 'Our job is to make sure that we form a strong and stable government.

When Theresa May appears in front of the 1922 Committee this evening, her first words should be ‘I am sorry’. She should apologise to those who lost their seats, to the party for the damage she has done to it and to the country for the chaos that she has plunged it into with this unnecessary election. Once she has done with those mea culpas, she should say sorry for the way she ran Number 10. She should make clear that this will now change, that there will be a return to Cabinet government and that she will see the 1922 executive every fortnight; you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she has seen the ’22 executive since becoming PM. The next thing May should do is acknowledge that she can’t lead the Tories into another general election.

Michael Gove will get all the headlines, and there is something darkly ironic about his appointment. Theresa May may be fighting for her political life, but even her 11th hour manoeuvres have a sharp edge. She’s been forced to bring back a man she sacked, but her choice of job is lovely: Michael Gove of the Leave campaign now gets to tell British farmers how life will be better when farm subsidies end. Meanwhile, Gove replaces Andrea Leadsom, another Leaver, who as Commons leader now gets to oversee the speeding legislative freight train that is the Great Repeal Bill, not to mention seven or eight other bits of Brexit legislation - all without a Commons majority.

Theresa May might still be in office, but she is not in power in anything like the way she was before. On the Marr Show, Michael Fallon made clear that the Cabinet had told Theresa May to drop her two chiefs of staff, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, and that they had told her that there would have to be more collective decision making from now on. Fallon’s interview made clear that May now serves at the pleasure of the Cabinet. I suspect that as soon as they think she can be removed without prompting another election, she will be. But one thing helping May stay in Number 10 is that there couldn’t be a Tory coronation, the party is too divided over both policy—the nature of Brexit—and personnel, Boris fans and those who think he has 35 million problems, for that.

Senior figures in Europe have spent the last few days pondering how Theresa May’s bungled election gamble will affect the upcoming Brexit negotiations. To the surprise of many, May, who campaigned to remain in the EU, had apparently set the UK on course for a hard Brexit, which involved leaving the single market behind. There was also the famous line that: 'No deal is better than a bad deal'. Now though, May’s botched election leaves a question mark over her Brexit strategy. These shifting political sands have not gone unnoticed on the continent, where politicians and bureaucrats are sharpening their pencils ahead of the start of Brexit negotiations.

George Osborne has been enjoying himself in the last few days - no more so than on the sofa of the Andrew Marr show this morning. The former Chancellor, who was sacked by Theresa May, revealed for the first time the PM's parting words to him when she gave him the boot: 'She said I needed to get to know my party better. So..' Osborne didn't stop there with dishing up revenge for the PM. Here's his analysis of how long May has left in Downing Street: George Osborne says Theresa May is a "dead woman walking" — and it's just a question of when she will gohttps://t.co/YtRxj7tGtH #GE2017 pic.twitter.com/HxDgilFpwn— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) June 11, 2017 'Theresa May is a dead woman walking, it's just a question of how long she's going to remain on Death Row.

Only one Cabinet member – Chris Grayling – had a good word to say about Theresa May and even he waited hours to say it. The silence of the others underlines the scale of trouble that the Prime Minister is in with her own party after blowing its majority in pursuit of a personal mandate. If she had won a landslide (which seemed to be there for the taking), she wanted to make it a very personal landslide, asking people to ‘vote for me’ rather than her party. As I say in my Daily Telegraph column today, the defeat must now be owned by her personally. And the silence of her Cabinet is intended to let her dwell upon this fact: she shut most of them up during the campaign, hoping to personalise the glory of victory. They now want her to personalise the misery of defeat.

One upshot of May’s election fail is that the Cabinet will now be far more influential, as I say in The Sun this morning. They are determined to force her to listen to them more and not just rely on her two chiefs of staff. ‘She needs to realise she can’t do this all on her own’, complains one Secretary of State. ‘She needs a bit of help’. The Cabinet are brutally clear about how the Tories losing their majority is May’s fault. ‘Her limitations have been fully exposed in public’, one tells me. But May’s position is safe for now. Why? Because the Tories don’t want another election. They fear that the momentum is with Labour and that they would do even worse in an autumn poll.

Pundits and pollsters have spent the last year trying to explain what the Brexit vote meant. Was it right-wing or left-wing? Was it about immigration or sovereignty? Was it a bit racist? They'll do the same for this election – trying to pinpoint where it all went so humiliatingly wrong for Theresa May. But to me one answer, even so soon after shock result – and before we've been able fully to analyse the results – stands out by a mile: the dementia tax.  There are five reasons, I'd argue, why it ruined Theresa May's election campaign and may have been the key factor in destroying her parliamentary majority. 1.

There's not a cabinet minister in sight to fight Theresa May's corner following a disastrous election result. However, Tory backbenchers are proving more forthcoming. The only issue is they don't seem to have much nice to say about their leader. After Anna Soubry called on May to consider her position, Heidi Allen has gone one step further and predicted -- in an interview with LBC -- that May will be gone within six months: 'I don't believe that Theresa May will stay as our Prime Minister indefinitely. In my view, it may well just be a period of transition. We do need to get some stability. But I just don't know how that's going to pan out in the next sort of week or two.

I am no psychologist but I don’t think you have to be one to appreciate that there is some turmoil going on in the mind of the man who wrote the Evening Standard’s four front page headlines today. 'May Hung Out to Dry', 'May’s Right Royal Mess', 'May’s Irish Bailout', 'Queen of Denial' – these headlines have been presented by many today as a sign of a man enjoying himself, of revelling in schadenfreude. True, none of these headlines is exactly unfair, but the obsessive search for ever more painful ways of twisting the knife into the Prime Minister is surely indicative of something going on deep in the soul of the author.

Theresa May's election gamble hasn't paid off. Yet in spite of the PM blowing her majority, May has vowed to carry on and offer 'certainty' to Britain. Overnight, May's miscalculation has transformed her from an 'iron lady' into a 'wobbly' political figure in the eyes of the European press. Here’s how the general election has been covered on the continent:  Germany: Germany’s largest daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung rounds on Theresa May, branding her a 'terrible election campaigner' and contrasts the 'strong and stable' image that she sought to present with what was perceived as a very weak campaign.