May, lacking in self-awareness, pitched her election campaign to a country that no longer exists
by Jay Elwes / June 9, 2017 / Leave a comment
Theresa May visits a bakery in Lancashire and Fleetwood. The seat was a Labour hold. Photo: PA
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 clear…
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