Express & Star

Express & Star comment: Why don’t you listen to what UK is saying Prime Minister?

The people of the Black Country have spoken.

Published
Prime Minister Theresa May

By a huge majority – around 80 per cent – the readers of this paper have told Mrs May they do not want her Brexit deal, they do not accept her Brexit deal and they will not support her Brexit deal.

Many of the Prime Minister's own ministers and back benchers are telling her the same thing.

Her response, in a gruelling three--hour session in the House of Commons and later, facing the world's press, has been to declare that her deal is the right one for the national interest, and that she is determined to deliver it.

But we don't want it. And she isn't listening.

Mrs May claims that no-one has come up with alternative proposals. That is clearly untrue. A string of former ministers and MPs on both sides have give her an endless stream of options over the last two years.

The truth is that her deal is the best she could secure from her opposite numbers in the European Union. She has been outplayed and outclassed by some expert negotiators who knew what they wanted and what they didn't want us to have.

They have run rings around our Prime Minister and left her with a bad deal for this country and its citizens. Even her own Brexit Secretary, Dominic Raab, has quit saying he can't back the deal. And he was at least partly responsible for negotiating it. He clearly feels we could do better.

Mrs May, on the other hand, robotically stands before the nation parroting the same lines, that the course she has set out for Brexit is the right one. That she believes in her course "with every fibre of my being".

There is something admirable about dogged determination. This country has always found a place in its heart for those with grit and firm belief.

But there has got to be a limit. Someone can believe, passionately, that the earth is flat. It doesn't make them right. And most of the rest of us know that.

Mrs May can believe in her Brexit deal all she likes; it doesn't make it right and it doesn't make it any more acceptable to the rest of the country.

It is hardly surprising that her insistence on ploughing her own lonely furrow has seen leading Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg at the head of a string of MPs in submitting letters of no confidence to the Conservative Party's backbench 1922 Committee in the hope of triggering a leadership bid by someone – anyone – else.

They do not just speak for many MPs; they speak for a nation that has lost confidence in its leader.

She is out of touch, out of tune with the mood of ordinary people in this country, and she needs to go. The trouble is that Mrs May isn't listening to anyone telling her what she doesn't want to hear.

Remember her old line about being 'strong and stable'? Instead, she is stubborn and inflexible, too weak to recognise the sheer wrongness of her position. Like a panicky trapeze artist on a high wire, she is terrified of doing anything but follow her single path to its inevitable conclusion.

The trouble is, that high wire is about to be severed. She stands no chance whatsover of convincing a majority of MPs in the Commons to support her deal. It will fail. She has already failed.

It is time for someone else to get a grip and salvage the national interest from the morass Mrs May has led us into.