Piers Morgan: Dear Theresa, you are a discredited dead duck

British Prime Minister Theresa May addresses the press in Downing street, London. Photo / AP

Opinion

You're toast, Theresa.

It's over.

Kaput.

Finito.

The fork has been well and truly stuck firmly in your political back and there's no possible way you can now try to cling onto power.

As Monty Python put it in their Dead Parrot sketch, your position is not just 'pining', it has 'ceased to be', reports Daily Mail.

You've just waged the worst campaign in British political history and as a result, been spectacularly humiliated.

Yet extraordinarily, as I write this, you're insisting you will stay on and you're actively plotting a desperate, dirty coalition government with the dinosaur DUP bigots in Northern Ireland to save your own skin.

Please spare us, and yourself, this absurd farce.

It's far too an important a time for the country to have such a severely damaged, weakened leader.

The European leaders must be laughing their heads off.

You, Theresa May, are still going to be leading the Brexit negotiations in a few days time?
A woman who just blew a massive landslide lead in the polls to actually lose her party's existing majority?

They'll chew you up like a piece of frazzled, barbecued gristle - then spit you and Britain onto a financial bonfire.

Leadership is about being a leader, whether fighting elections or negotiating deals.
It means standing up and showing people you're the boss.

You seemed to get this at the start of the campaign with your bold gamble to call a snap election and emphatic 'strong and stable' mantra.

Yet very quickly it became painfully obvious your leadership skills were pathetically weak and grotesquely unstable.

I've never seen anyone wilt under fire in such an alarming, derisory manner.

Your failure to take part in the TV debates summed up the general cowardice that pervaded your entire campaign.

What were you so scared of that meant you couldn't stand on a podium and debate important issues with your opponents?

We never found out but it made you look so spineless, especially at the last one when Jeremy Corbyn turned up and you sent Amber Rudd in your place, just two days after the death of her father.

Margaret Thatcher would never have done that; she'd have instinctively known how embarrassing it would look.

Equally ill-advised was your decision to shun many of the TV and radio shows that party leaders traditionally appear on during election campaigns.

This included Good Morning Britain, the ITV breakfast programme I co-host with Susanna Reid.

Again, what made you such a bottlejob? Corbyn dared to drag himself onto our sofa for a robust grilling and he emerged much the better for it because our viewers recognised he at least had the balls to face the music.

Even my mother, a lifelong conservative, admitted afterwards that she rather liked him.

TV matters. Fronting up to proper media interrogation matters.

Yet you largely preferred to hide in Downing Street like a timid little shrew, too terrified to step outside and take any risks.

You also surrounded yourself with vile, poisonous aides who loved screaming and shouting at the media for not towing the line but didn't have a clue how to defend a gigantic poll lead.

Your manifesto was clueless. It lacked clarity, despite you constantly banging on about being 'very clear', and it lacked any sense of theme, focus, purpose or ambition.

Worse, as exemplified by the disastrous 'dementia tax', it stupidly targeted the very people you most needed to vote for you: those who had worked hard all their life and saved enough money to buy a home they hoped to leave to their families.

You created totally unnecessary fear, panic and anger just as you ironically continued to insist everything was 'strong and stable'.

As own goals go in politics, this was right up there with the worst I've ever seen.

Then there was your record as Home Secretary. Many thought this would be a positive thing for you when Britain was hit by a series of terror attacks in recent weeks.

But the opposite happened as people realised it was you who had slashed police numbers and control orders, thus making it easier for the killers to escape detection.

Finally, there was your personality, or rather lack of it.

What was initially seen as reassuring dullness became a massively unappealing, relentless mundanity typified by your claim that the naughtiest thing you've ever done was run through a wheat field.

We laughed right to the point we realised you were deadly serious.

By contrast, Corbyn grew more interesting, passionate and animated as the campaign continued.

Let me be clear now: I don't think he should lead this country, mainly because I don't trust him as far as I can throw him on national security and he would never be able to pay for a tenth of the stuff he's promised.

But there is no denying he fought a great campaign.

As with Donald Trump in America, Corbyn positioned himself as an anti-establishment outsider and he successfully tapped into a lot of genuine anger and fear among millions of ordinary hard-working people about the quality of their healthcare, education and public services.

He also stole one of Trump's smarter campaign ploys by constantly appearing at rallies with thousands of his most diehard fans, thus creating a sense of constant, surging popularity.

And he showed some basic gumption.

My regular work driver said to me at 6am this morning: 'There's one word for Corbyn: perseverance.'

I agree.

The ability to simply 'keep buggering on' as Sir Winston Churchill liked to say is a massively underrated value.

Corbyn coped supremely well with a vicious press and scornful public.

The former never relaxed their attack, but the latter began to warm to him. In fact, the more Corbyn was savaged, the more the sceptical public liked his resilience.

As my 19-year-old middle son put it to me last night, after voting Labour: 'I like him dad, he's a decent bloke who wants to take care of those less fortunate or well off. What's so wrong with that?'

Millions of young people agreed with him and voted accordingly.

Yet despite your appalling campaigning, Prime Minister, I still presumed you'd win quite comfortably.

In fact, I tweeted yesterday afternoon that I thought you'd end up with a majority of 90-100 seats.

My rational was based on what happened in the last election in 2015 when many people openly flirted with the idea of voting for Ed Miliband's Labour Party but then played safe with the Conservatives.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

You got an absolute drubbing.

In fact, the result was so bad that Corbyn has even been able to claim victory despite the fact he lost.

As former chancellor George Osborne said: 'This is completely catastrophic for the Conservative Party.'

Well, when catastrophes happen in politics, one thing inevitably follows: the head of the leader.

You're now totally discredited, Prime Minister - among your cabinet, your MPs, your wider party members, the country and Europe.

We cannot afford to have such a lame duck leader as we head into the biggest national negotiations in my lifetime.

So stop being so deluded, stubborn and selfish.

You boasted of being a 'bloody difficult woman' but, as with Hillary Clinton, you turned out to be a 'bloody unelectable woman'.

For the sake of Britain, you must go - and go now.