Having earlier told a tabloid that she was “sick of them crashing energy prices”, amid coughing, fighting and a protester handing her a fake P45, the former prime minister managed to declare: “We will always take on monopolies and vested interests when they hold the people behind.” It is clear that the standard variable tariff cap was designed not only with the best of intentions – but also with focus group polling in mind. Because something similar was originally formulated by “Red” Ed Miliband, between bites of a bacon sandwich. Since the idea seemed to imply that customers would get money out of their accounts, the public naturally lapped it up. Everyone was apparently so distracted by the wheels coming off Mrs May’s crash course that they failed to understand the concerns raised by bodies such as the Competition and Markets Authority, which had earlier warned that a cap carried “excessive risks of undermining competitive process. likely to lead to worse outcomes for clients in the long run.” And while Mrs May could not have predicted that Russia would continue to invade Ukraine four years after its 2018 Gas and Electricity (Tariff Cap) Act received Royal Assent (despite Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014), the policy has proven to be one of many disasters on her watch. It failed to contain energy bills while destroying competition in the market while pushing many suppliers into bankruptcy. We tend to remember Mrs May for squandering her majority and her inability to get Brexit done. But her legacy quickly proves to be even more devastating than that. It is beyond ironic that she refused to applaud Boris Johnson during the final Prime Minister’s Questions when you consider that if it weren’t for her former foreign secretary, the Conservatives would be in political Siberia right now , with Mrs May looking even more of a political pariah than she is now. Arms folded, face like thunder, it looks like Maybot has been reprogrammed to forget how bad her three-year tenure was. But we still remember. Consider the points of her Brexit debacle that Mr Johnson has been unable to fix. Thanks to the MP for Maidenhead’s disastrous mishandling of our negotiations with the EU, we have ended up with a Northern Ireland Protocol that serves both sides badly and now needs to be reformed. It’s all very well the Remainiacs, who thrived under Mrs May’s hapless administration, blaming Johnson for signing it. But the truth is that Brexit would have been lost had he not reached some sort of exit deal with the EU after being handed a bag full of Brussels fudge by his bumbling predecessor and denied the no-deal option by Parliament. that Mrs May had allowed rioting to happen. Even today, we still have to put up with those who drank the Checkers Kool-Aid arguing that we must return to the single market – ignoring more than ever the constitutional consequences of overturning a once-in-a-lifetime democratic mandate. But it gets worse. Witness the Modern Slavery Act – a piece of legislative virtue-marking, introduced by Mrs May when she was Home Secretary, now used by illegal immigrants to avoid deportation, along with foreign murderers and rapists. It was classic Mayism. No one has any idea of a public priority, and it was cooked up with so many loopholes that it is now having disastrous results. As former immigration minister Chris Philp explained to this newspaper earlier this month, poorly drafted legislation – intended to protect vulnerable people from labor exploitation, domestic servitude or sex trafficking – is now being dangerously exploited. He said he had seen Channel immigrants deny being victims of slavery, only to change their story to avoid deportation after speaking with their lawyers. Even more worryingly, he added: “I have seen case after case where serious foreign criminals – including sadistic rapists and brutal murderers – have used claims of modern slavery at the last minute to avoid deportation back home.” Calling for the law to be tightened, he said the law, introduced in 2015, allowed “absurdly low levels” of proof of slavery and “no evidence at all”. He also pointed to the UK’s “incredibly naive” implementation of a Council of Europe treaty to combat modern slavery. While France and Germany had applied a stricter definition of slavery claims, Britain was more relaxed – meaning it had 10 times the annual 1,000 to 2,000 claims of the two EU countries. Priti Patel, Mrs May’s successor as home secretary, must now clear up the mess by overhauling the law “to make sure the system is about victim recovery rather than an open migration route”. Then there is the net zero, which was rushed through a month before Mrs May left office – with no debate and little scrutiny. As with the Modern Slavery Act, it was designed to curry favor with the tree-hugging types who are never going to vote Tory in some attempt to split today’s Conservatives from what Mrs May once described as the “bad party ». But in reality, all the 2050 target has achieved is to leave a very bad taste for ordinary taxpayers. The type of people who separate their recycling and would buy an electric car – if they could afford it. The rush to decarbonise the economy, with no plan for how to achieve it in such a short space of time, threatens to become one of the costliest mistakes in recent British history. We were also forced to estimate the cost of Mrs May’s cuts to police numbers. Fine, the coalition committed to an austerity programme, but her decision, as home secretary, to cut budgets by 18 per cent in 2010 was an absolute disaster. A little over a decade later and despite efforts to reverse the cuts, lo and behold, we are now plagued by a crime wave. From innocent Olivia Pratt-Korbel, nine, who was shot dead in her home in Liverpool, to knife-wielding thugs on the rampage in residential areas, to people having their Rolexes stolen in the heart of Mayfair, there’s a sense of rampant lawlessness on the streets of Britain. Recorded crime in England and Wales is now at a 20-year high, according to figures released last month by the Office for National Statistics with around 6.3 million crimes reported to the police in the year to March 2022. However, just 5.6 percent of crimes reported to police resulted in a suspect being charged or summoned – a new low. Part of it is down to a failure of leadership – but as any brass will tell you, the rot started to set in with Mrs May’s cuts. And to think we haven’t even gotten to her pioneering the trend of giving the NHS billions for nothing in return (remember when she gave it £20bn for its 70th ‘birthday’ in 2018?) or how she managed to poison her social reform care with her farcical “nothing has changed” turn. Now no politician will dare to do something brave to fix the system. There has been much criticism of Mr Johnson, but the next prime minister may well find himself spending more time untangling the mistakes Mrs May made – not the Big Dog she refused to throw a bone to.
