What is surprising is the increasingly apparent extent of how bad May’s poltical judgement has been and continues to be. Normally politicians don’t have careers as long as hers, and especially get to become PM, without very good antennae. It now looks as if she was only able to become PM because of a very specific set of circumstances where it almost fell into her lap, and she largely needed to do nothing as one by one Cameron, Gove, Johnson and Leadsom etc. took themselves out of the picture by their own mistakes. She did not have to actively campaign for the party leadership in a typical full on leadership contest while in opposition and then fight a general election to become PM.
It looks to me like her very quick announcement of a deal with the DUP was born out of similar bad judgement and panic to fill a vacuum. When Gordon Brown lost the 2010 election, he waited it out in Downing Street in silence until the Conservatives and Lib Dems had agreed a deal. Obviously the situation now is different because the Conservatives are still the largest party and so are expected to form a government, but the mark of a good politician/statesman in May’s shoes in that situation would be to consult widely and take as much time as they possibly can to consider their options and the likely consequences.
Instead, May seems to have been panicked into agreeing a deal very quickly with the DUP and announcing it very quickly. Possibly she did this out of a sense of responsibility as PM/leader to act and stop the uncertainty causing damage to financial markets and the Pound etc., and possibly she felt she needed to make an announcement to stop the speculation about Labour forming a government with the other parties (the suggestions from Labour that they could form a government look like good political skills: they know they could not form a stable government, but it may have rattled May and been an added prompt to act unnecessarily quickly to stop the speculation).
The deal with the DUP itself, and the manner/hurry of its making, looks like it may be almost as big an error as calling the election. It seems she has announced the deal without actually having agreed the key terms of the deal with the DUP (in complete contrast to the negotiations between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems after the 2010 election, when the deal was only announced after the terms had been hammered out in fine detail). The DUP will want its pound of flesh, and I suspect that many Conservative MPs and the UK electorate will find the sweeteners to the DUP to be at best repugnant (extra money for Northern Ireland – say £400M, which would nicely cover the budget shortfall due to the RHI scandal) and at worst unacceptable (damage to the Good Friday agreement and harming the UK Government’s role as honest broker in NI, or any influence whatsoever over government policies affecting the rest of the UK).
I suspect that May’s premiership is now moving into just managing crises from day to day. Her current overriding priority is to pass the Queen’s Speech. I can’t help thinking that her deal with the DUP to achieve that, will add to the problems that she will rapidly face thereafter, but possibly she is planning to fall on her sword very soon, and so only cares about getting the Queen’s Speech through.
If they cannot pass the Queen’s Speech, then the Conservatives and the country will be in a really big mess, and I imagine there would have to be another GE within possibly as little as a couple of months. That is the last thing the Conservatives want, since Corbyn and Labour would probably do even better, and possibly even win, and the Conservatives need time to organise a change of leadership and a honeymoon period for the new leader in the opinion polls when they would be most likely to call an election. For that reason I suspect the Conservatives may well try and avoid a leadership contest, in order to be able to appoint a new leader unopposed as quickly as possible. A lengthy drawn out leadership contest would be risky, since the longer it takes, the more likelihood that things will be unravelling in Parliament and Brexit negotiations etc. while the contest is underway, and that will make the Conservatives look very bad (fiddling having a leadership contest while Rome is burning).
