YP Comment: May does herself no favours

Seven days ago, Theresa May still hoped to secure a comfortable Commons majority after calling a snap election over Brexit. Now the Prime Minister is fighting for her political life.

Yet, despite telling Tory MPs “I’m the person who got us into this mess and I’m the one who will get us out of it”, Mrs May is not doing herself any favours as she tries to form a pact with Northern Ireland’s hard-line Democratic Unionist Party.

With both the DUP, and the new bloc of 13 Conservative MPs from Scotland, now making the most of their new-found influence, the Tory leader could have redressed the balance by elevating the post of Northern Powerhouse Minister to the Cabinet.

Given how Mrs May launched her manifesto in West Yorkshire, a region where her party expected to make gains and ended up losing two seats to Labour, such a move would have a signalled a desire, on her part, to prioritise investment in the North as part of Britain’s economic transformation.

However it only became clear last night that Brigg and Goole MP Andrew Percy had stepped down as Northern Powerhouse Minister and reportedly has been replaced by the Lancashire MP Jake Berry. Six days after the election, it suggests the North is still an after-thought. And, though Mrs May says she has learned lessons, her reluctance to change course of Brexit – the PM still won’t reappraise the merit of her pre-election decision to pull Britain out of the single market – will only unite her opponents on all sides of the political divide when the UK needs to be pulling together in the national interest.