May must stand up to rudd. The work and pensions secretary is not indispensable. | thearticle

Amber Rudd is reported to have threatened Theresa May with “up to 40 resignations” from the Government if MPs are not allowed a free vote on plans to head off a no-deal Brexit and extend

Article 50 to allow more time for negotiation. It makes a good headline, but sometimes there is less to a story than meets the eye. Pause for a moment to consider Ms Rudd’s conduct. She was

only appointed to her present post at Work and Pensions in mid-November, after Esther McVey resigned because she could not bring herself to support the Prime Minister’s Withdrawal Agreement.

Ms Rudd herself had been forced to resign as Home Secretary last April for misleading the House of Commons over the Windrush Scandal. To be brought back into the Cabinet after serving only

just over six months on the backbenches is unusual if not unprecedented: not so much kid-glove treatment as killing the fatted calf for return of the prodigal daughter. Now, after just two

months in office, Ms Rudd is threatening to resign again — assuming that she does include herself among the forty recalcitrant ministers, though so far only three have broken cover, and only

one (Richard Harrington, a junior minister at the Department for Business) has actually said he would resign without a free vote. Having barely got her feet under the desk at Work and

Pensions, Ms Rudd is getting ready to clear it again — while doing her best to bring down the Government too — over an issue that isn’t even her direct responsibility. It’s not as though

this particular Secretary of State didn’t have an important job to do. Her department’s flagship policy, Universal Credit, is generally acknowledged to be in crisis. This is the biggest

reform of the welfare state for at least a generation. Its success or failure will impact on the lives of many millions of our poorest fellow citizens far more immediately than the question

of how hard or soft a Brexit we end up with. Universal Credit is fiendishly complicated. In the news cycle it is usually filed under the heading “boring but important”; consequently, its

significance is usually downplayed. But in any case Ms Rudd is not a woman for detail: she leaves that sort of thing to her civil servants. That’s what got her into trouble at the Home

Office: she gave the impression, however unfairly, of not being fully in charge of immigration policy or even knowing whether or not there were targets. Her officials were doubtless to

blame, as was her predecessor, Mrs May, and the whole scandal was somewhat overblown. But that is the whole point of sitting at the Cabinet table: the buck stops with you. And so, quite

properly, she resigned. Ms Rudd’s present predicament is quite different. She wants to push the Prime Minister into ruling out no-deal and is using the threat of resignation as a tool to get

her way. If she really cannot square her conscience with Government policy, then of course she should go. But that policy has not significantly changed since she rejoined the Cabinet less

than ten weeks ago. It is she who is trying to overturn Mrs May’s admittedly embattled strategy of demanding concessions by using the imminent prospect of Britain leaving the EU without

paying the heavy price that the EU is seeking to exact. If next week’s proposal to tie the Prime Minister’s hands by taking no-deal off the table is whipped, all members of the Government

will be expected to vote for it. At that point, those ministers who find acquiescing in a no-deal Brexit to be unconscionable should resign. But Ms Rudd is evidently reluctant to resign

again. She would rather not have to be forced to make such a choice. And so she has put her own needs before those of the Government by trying to bully a Prime Minister who treated her

generously but whom she now assumes is too weak to resist her. That is nothing less than blackmail. In politics, as in life, the threat is usually stronger than the execution. Theresa May

should face down this rebellion and stick to her guns. I would be astonished if forty ministers were to resign. In fact, even four would be a surprise. But however many decide to go, the

Prime Minister must not appease them. What little authority she has left would be destroyed if she allowed herself to be blackmailed. Amber Rudd is capable and charismatic, but she is not

indispensable.