SKETCH: While Theresa May was dutiful, she was additionally a dismal PM
WHEN a former prime minister leaves the House of Commons, it is just proper to boost a salute. Occupying that top workplace, for regardless of how lengthy or brief a time, is a major endeavor. With Theresa May saying her retirement as an MP, let propriety due to this fact be noticed. Let her stamina and sense of obligation be acknowledged. Aged 67, she has served her stint.
Public life isn’t, nonetheless, that easy. There is not any avoiding a sure stink bomb within the works. Lady May (as she ought to be formally addressed, owing to the knighthood her husband Philip obtained after she left Downing Street) was a dismal prime minister.
She was proper down within the reputational basement with Lord North (lack of the American colonies), Anthony Eden (Suez) and Liz Truss (financial meltdown). Just excited about her premiership fills one with despair. Who can neglect the drab agony of these days, the stagnation, the half-choked repetition of ‘Brexit means Brexit’ and ‘robust and steady management’ in that clucking-pheasant voice?
She proved as robust and steady as a leaky junk. It almost value us our nation.
The interval from 2016 to 2019 was a time of nationwide embarrassment when Britain was humiliated by the European Union. The Remainer elite, with Mrs May’s sloping-shouldered connivance, got here near overturning the folks’s revolution of Brexit and the misplaced alternative of these years continues to plague us. Much of the blame for that falls on the Oxfordshire vicar’s daughter who thought she had what it took to be prime banana, solely to search out she was tragically misinformed.
Our sketchwriter says Theresa May was uninteresting, however aides identified she had thrilling sneakers
Quentin Letts, above, argues that Mrs May was a dismal prime minister
She turned an MP in 1997 simply as John Major was being catapulted out of Downing Street by Tony Blair. Mrs May, 40, beforehand a south London councillor, labored on the Association for Payment Clearing Services earlier than she entered the Commons. As a parliamentary orator, she was unremarkable. There was no proof of a inventive thoughts. She regurgitated the get together line and was by no means humorous or impolite or controversial. Like her cricket hero Geoffrey Boycott, she blocked for England.
The Tory benches of that period shimmered with crooks and lunatics however Theresa Mary May was unremittingly sober. She was a middle-of-the-road Anglican churchgoer. Her one, much-milked foible was a keenness for vibrant footwear. When we journalists stated ‘Golly, she’s a bore’, her aides would say ‘however she has such thrilling sneakers’.
The get together political system all the time wants its obedient dullards they usually often come from secure seats like Mrs May’s Maidenhead, the place brio at election hustings is unimportant in a candidate. May 1997 was a superb time to turn into a brand new Tory
MP as a result of there have been so few of them, making promotion extra probably. Within a yr, she was shadow minister for ladies and the disabled.
She jockeyed that gender ticket fairly onerous. Under the management of William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard – three bald males – it actually did no hurt to be a Tory girl.
Cautious centrism was the political orthodoxy. Mrs May occupied shadow ministerial briefs, together with transport, surroundings, tradition, and pensions. In none did she depart an impression. The one stir she made was as get together chairman, when she advised the 2002 get together convention that the Tories had been seen as ‘the nasty get together’. Rightly or wrongly, certainly they had been, for that was how the pro-Blair media painted them. It was one other three years earlier than David Cameron turned Tory chief and the get together began projecting sunshine.
When Mr Cameron shaped his coalition authorities in 2010, he despatched Mrs May to the Home Office. There she remained till 2016, a notable act of survival. She was the Andrei Gromyko of the austerity years and, like that long-time Soviet politburo member, she maintained ruthless management of her division’s message.
She typically talked a tricky recreation on immigration and urged ‘a extremely hostile surroundings for unlawful migration’. It didn’t cease numbers creeping upwards however that ‘hostile surroundings’ phrase rebounded on her politically.
Labour used it to assault the remedy of Afro-Caribbeans within the Windrush scandal. The row presumably defined Mrs May’s extra liberal stance on stop-and-search powers.
One felt anguish, despair, discomfort and contempt when Mrs May tried to carry out
Colleagues argued that her reluctance to permit the police to look younger males led to an increase in knife crime. The group worst affected by that was younger black males. An unintended consequence.
Known for ‘doing a submarine’ – ie sinking out of view when troublesome selections had been being taken – Mrs May actually submerged through the EU referendum. Despite years of huffing and puffing about European human rights laws, she disappeared and quietly backed Remain.
The nation voted Leave, Mr Cameron give up, Boris Johnson was stitched up by Michael Gove and Mrs May turned PM. Fearful that her small parliamentary majority would see her pushed about by Eurosceptics, she referred to as a snap election – and blew it. Now she was pushed about by Europhiles. Another unintended consequence.
What was outstanding about that 2017 election was how horrible she was at promoting herself and, equivalent to they had been, her concepts. She seemed depressing. At a rally in Twickenham, I requested her why she was such a glumbucket. She stalled mid-air, unable to supply a response. ‘Strong and steady’, was about all we ever heard.
Watching her carry out, one felt anguish, despair, discomfort and contempt. How dare she put herself up for the highest job if she was so badly suited to probably the most primary political perform of all; campaigning? The Remainers, partly led by Sir Keir Starmer, conspired with Brussels and really almost wrecked Brexit. If that had occurred, one dreads to suppose what would have ensued. Despite attempting to prop up her fortunes by boogy-woogying on to the 2018 convention stage, Mrs May’s Brexit In Name Only coverage, as her critics referred to as it, noticed her drummed out of energy and changed by Boris.
Milky moderation had spawned the chaotic maverick. A 3rd unintended consequence.
She stayed within the Commons. Give her that. Many different toppled PMs have fled Westminster on the first probability. But, in 2019, she retained Maidenhead and have become a brooding presence two benches again from the despatch field.
She didn’t do a Ted Heath and sulk however she did make a couple of petulant noises when she felt her file on trendy slavery and web zero wasn’t being revered. Slavery and web zero could excite some altruistic souls however neither is mainline Conservatism. Neither grabs the favored vote. These are insurance policies for the mandarinate and think-tanks, for the clerisies of BBC editors and social scientists, the Third Sector and the Fifth Column. They will not be the concepts of a red-clawed democrat.
And so, with all due respect, it is goodbye to the glumbucket. She was all the time courteous. She was conscientious, virtually ploddingly so. She by no means swore in public, by no means overdid the electrical soup, was by no means unkempt or licentious.
But she by no means set the voters on hearth. Which, within the twenty first century, is a downside in a politician.
She, and we, may need been happier had she stayed on the Association for Payment Clearing Services and by no means darkened Westminster’s doorways.
