It's Time For May To Step Down From The Moral High Ground

‘Given her record, May is in no position to lecture her successor’

- Leo McKinstry

No Modern Prime Minister has been more ill-suited to the role than Theresa May. A mediocre politician devoid of charisma, credibility, and conviction, she presided over a disastrously paralyzed Government. Almost as soon as she entered Downing Street, the authority began to drain away. After less than three years in office, she departed in a flood of tears, leaving behind a miserable legacy of broken promises and chronic misjudgments.

That is what makes her extraordinary attack on Boris Johnson so unjustified. In a newspaper article to mark the inauguration of President Biden yesterday, May denounced her successor for abandoning Britain’s “position of moral leadership” in the world.

She reserved particular venom for his recent cut in the foreign aid budget and his threat to overturn the Northern Irish protocol in the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, negotiated last October. Both these decisions, she claimed, had damaged us “in the eyes of the world”. Resorting to the kind of finger-wagging sanctimony that has long been her trademark, she declared that “we must live up to our values”.