Theresa May's pyrrhic victory means she will have to fight on all fronts

Shortly after Harold Wilson had turned a majority of four into one of 96, he was entertaining a foreign dignitary on the golf course. “How’s your handicap, Harold?” he asked.

Quick as a flash, Wilson replied: “Up from four to 96.” Theresa May, unfortunately, has no such luxury. Having called a general election with a twenty point lead in the polls, this election saw her party not only fail to increase its majority, but lose seats across England, Wales and Scotland.

Her first and most immediate problem is her party, much of which now privately regards her election win as a negative one: secured through a last-minute, tenuous agreement with the DUP, not a validation of her argument that the Conservatives must abandon what has, since 1979, effectively become the right’s defining creed: free markets, big business, and low regulation.

Conservative MPs, even those who were never fans, respected her considerable popularity in the country at large. As that has faded and ebbed, so too has her stock.

Steadying the ship is now the immediate priority. The much-briefed plans to reward loyalists (Amber Rudd) and punish the numerate (Philip Hammond) will have to be put on hold.

If survival can be secured, which is likely but not certain, there are many dark clouds ahead.

The parts of her manifesto that nodded to Tory orthodoxy are safe, at least within her party: plans to reintroduce grammar schools and a free vote on fox hunting, for example. But her social care plans, which caused her so much anguish on the campaign trail, will continue to be a running sore.

School funding, an issue on which Labour made considerable weather on the campaign trail, will not go away either.

Then, too, there is the plan to balance the books and get the best Brexit deal. The difficulty is that these two plans are in direct conflict. One of the things May has done well is not box herself in as far as continuing contributions to the European Union budget are concerned. Indeed, her manifesto has an explicit commitment to paying to retain parts of EU membership the UK wishes to keep.

But the ability to drive that through the Commons may have expired with her social care policy. May called this election to escape her own party as much as anything else, and she is now firmly its prisoner. Not only of the Tory right, but its left and centre. She is a Prime Minister on probation.

And then there are the public finances. For all the Conservatives have been running on a “mission accomplished” ticket as far as the UK’s finances are concerned, the terrifying truth is that the levers of finance are where Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling left them in 2010. The United Kingdom is still in no fit state to weather another financial crisis.

But the Conservatives have pushed up against the political limits of deficit reduction. They spent the first five years in office cutting services used by Labour voters—and now they face the rather less congenial prospect of cutting services used by their own.

Theresa May might be forgiven for wishing she could trade places with Jeremy Corbyn.