The failure of her political project is total. The style was wrong, the substance was wrong, her personality was wrong. Everything about her was narrow, not least her political circle, which contained just two other people, both of them advisors, both of them chosen for their dog-like loyalty. Here was a Prime Minister who shunned others and tried to make a virtue of it, telling crowds that she didn’t drink in Westminster’s bars and didn’t engage in political gossip, as if it were a sign of her deep seriousness. In fact, it signalled a more off-putting truth: that she had no political friends. And what could be more unappealing than that?
These failings made her weak from the start. The policies came, and went. In the end, despite attempts to project efficiency and a tough, Tory pragmatism, she conveyed only weakness.
But her real failure went deeper than her awkward speaking style, her refusal to participate in televised debates, the gruffness of her Westminster team, her inability to work with other people, or even her unseemly rush across the Atlantic to hold hands with perhaps the only western politician more disastrous than she. No; the PM’s real failure was that she didn’t understand the country that she wanted to lead. The Britain she thought was there, wasn’t. It hasn’t been for many decades.
And it was Europe that showed this most clearly. Throughout the campaign, May urged people to vote for her, so that she might “fulfil the promise of Brexit,” a phrase that reached for biblical grandeur, but which sounded slightly deranged. A vote for her, she said, would “strengthen my hand,” in the Brexit negotiations. She disparaged the “Brussels bureaucrats,” whom she portrayed as the baying opposition, a Euro-mob intent on fighting to bring down Britain’s bold attempt to free itself from the deadening clutches of continental bureaucracy. Her language became increasingly confrontational, so that by the end of it she was offering to take Britain into something close to a diplomatic war with the EU, where, she hinted, even Britain’s intelligence and security apparatus might be used as a bargaining chip to win concessions from Brussels on immigration and trade. (Her apparent threat to withdraw security cooperation has come to seem deeply cynical in the light of the terror attacks that scarred the campaign.)
But Britain, it seems, didn’t want that. The idea of entering into a headlong fight with our closest and oldest diplomatic friends just didn’t wash. People tend not to vote for confrontation. Aggression isn’t attractive. We are not at war on the continent. Neither are we in a position to show up at international meetings and dominate. And yet this seemed to be the entirety of her Brexit plan. Britain would simply state its demands and the Europeans would agree to them, and if they didn’t like it, they could all get stuffed—or as she put it, “no deal is better than a bad deal.” It seems she never saw the ludicrous double-meaning of that phrase, just as she never appreciated that Britain has not been able to adopt that sort of posture on the international stage since Suez.
This failure to understand what Britain is showed up in almost everything she did. It could be seen in her ludicrous suggestion that she might bring back fox hunting, in her failure to see that televised debates are a useful tool for speaking directly to the modern electorate, in her robotic use of daft stock phrases which made her a laughing stock on social media (“strong and stable…”), in her failure to convey any sense that she understood the economic dislocation that persists in Britain or that she had any plan to address it—in all of these regards and more, she failed to see what was in front of her nose.
This myopia led to her to a sort of mid-twentieth century preachiness, a sense that what people needed was to be told off and shoved in the right direction. In this vision, there was a much greater role for the state, which would not feel at all squeamish about intervening more directly in people’s lives. That statist approach became clear when she took office and immediately set up two vast new government departments: one to negotiate Brexit, the other to hammer out new trade deals. She had initially opposed Brexit, but soon took on the fervour of the convert. “Brexit means Brexit.” The state was gearing up to re-make Britain’s relationship with the outside world, a colossal undertaking and a huge—almost total—exercise in state intervention, with her in the lead.
It was what might be called Command Conservatism, a sort of Home Secretary’s view of how a country should be run. Government would be done to people. People will get into line. The government would not seek to understand the electorate, or their circumstances. Instead, a vision of the country would be over-layed onto British society. If that meant people had to be worse off so that immigration could come down, then so be it. If they were one of the 16.1 million people who voted Remain, tough. Brexit means Brexit. Really, it was a sort of nationalism, where everyone knew that Britain was supreme, foreigners were to be dominated and the grammar school-educated vicar’s daughter from the Home Counties would sail the ship of state into a future that looked very much like Britain’s glorious past. To criticise was to mark yourself out as suspect—an enemy of the people.
She failed because she didn’t see how out of kilter with modern Britain this vision really was—how ludicrous it all looked from the outside. And that really was her most fundamental problem: she suffered from a complete lack of self-awareness. And what good is a leader who’s got no idea that her worldview is fifty years out of date?
There can be no more complete a failure than that.
