What is the point of a Prime Minister reduced to begging the opposition for ideas?

It is a good idea for political parties to work together, and for MPs in different parties to cooperate in the common good. We therefore welcome the speech that the Prime Minister intends to make tomorrow. Her office issued a section of the text on Sunday. In it Theresa May, for the first time acknowledging that the result of the election “was not what I wanted”, and, addressing “the other parties in the House of Commons”, says: “Come forward with your own views and ideas.”

Better late than never, we suppose. But not much better. The good faith of her invitation to her opponents to help govern the country was undermined by the circumstances in which she called the election in the first place, accusing the Labour Party in particular of seeking to obstruct Brexit. Some of us might have wished that Jeremy Corbyn had sought at least to ask the nation to think again before our actual departure from the European Union. But that was not what Labour promised. Instead, it advocated a form of Brexit that would prioritise jobs and prosperity over the control of immigration – an objective that is shared by many on the Conservative side of the Commons.

Indeed, it was on those grounds that The Independent urged the people to vote in such a way as to prevent Ms May winning too large a majority. In this, as it turned out, we were more in tune with the British people than most of the opinion polls. We would not dream of claiming that it was The Independent wot lost it for Ms May, but she certainly lost her majority and that, rightly, has consequences.

It is a shame, however, that it has taken more than a month for the Prime Minister to acknowledge the defeat of the mandate that she sought. If she had made tomorrow’s speech on the Friday after the election, she would be in a stronger position now.

As it is, her invitation to other parties to contribute ideas looks like a political device that someone has given her to read out in the hope that it might fend off the carrion-eaters in her own party that are circling the sky above 10 Downing Street.

Indeed, the sincerity of her words was further undermined, before she had uttered them, by her repetition in the Commons today of the claim that 80 per cent of the votes cast at the election were for candidates standing on a policy of Brexit. Our argument, and we believe the Labour Party’s argument, is that there is within that 80 per cent a majority for a better and more successful Brexit than the one she had planned. Thank goodness that majority, reflected in the Commons, seems to be pushing the Government towards the sensible policy of staying in Euratom, the nuclear cooperation body, as an associate member if necessary. We hope this will be the first of many such victories, but for Ms May to anticipate defeat by claiming to have invited ideas from other parties rings hollow.

The big question behind Ms May’s speech is whether it is in the national interest that she should carry on in office or whether she should be replaced by David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, or whichever unexpected candidate a Tory leadership contest might throw up. That is the question with which Conservative MPs will struggle over the summer.

This is not simply an internal party matter. The rest of us are entitled to a view on who our prime minister should be. And The Independent’s view is that the very fact that the answer is unclear is a damning indictment of Ms May’s leadership. If she is driven to begging the opposition for policies, perhaps she should give way to someone who has a clearer idea of the way ahead.