Theresa May is too stupid by half. Editorial by Nick Cohen

Theresa May’s closed mind has brought her country to the brink of disaster. NICK COHEN’s damning verdict on a prime minister unfit to lead.

The New European
PUBLISHED: 10:32 28 February 2019

...May’s dismal achievement has been to shut Britain in a room without adults. Within a month – or, more probably, four months – we could be facing a recession as more than 40 years of legal and trade relations disappear, food shortages as perishable imports are left at the docks, and a health crisis as a no-deal Brexit has “an immediate and drastic effect” on supply chains for medicines, vaccines, medical devices and equipment, as the Lancet put it. Not even the greatest project fearmonger predicted in 2016 that four weeks from our departure the British prime minister would be playing Russian roulette with the country’s future: spinning the chamber and clicking the trigger until she gets her way. Far from being solid and practical, May is a staggeringly irresponsible politician, more akin to Donald Trump than the sensible Miss Marple figure commentators imagined they had found when she walked into Downing Street.

...“May is like a black hole sucking the light out of politics, he said. “Warnings are delivered to her, and ignored. Plans are run by her, unacknowledged. Messages are sent to her, unanswered. She has become the unperson of Downing Street: the living embodiment of the closed door.” Most seriously of all, ministers do not know whether she would push us over the cliff. Take a pause and consider that for a moment. The politicians who know her as well as anyone cannot assure us she would never risk Britain’s ruin. Everyone talks of her shutting out hard questions. “The most striking thing of all is how little she displayed much interest in wider political issues,” said Nick Clegg after working with her in cabinet. When ‘the issues’ cannot be wider, the ignorance of a closed and cloistered mind is at its most dangerous.

Lord Salisbury delivered the original ‘too clever by half’ insult in 1961 as he slapped down the middle-class Iain Macleod with patrician disdain. Macleod was too smart and slippery to lead the Conservatives, Salisbury noted. Why, he had even made money as a professional card player before becoming a politician. May is proving that it’s better to be too clever than too stupid; better to know when to cut your losses than gamble with your country when you have no cards to play.


https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/theresa-may-damning-verdicting-by-nich-cohen-1-5910468

The excerpts do not do this justice. Worth the whole read.