Theresa May doesn’t understand the country she wants to lead

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 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…

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Comments

S Hamlyn
June 10, 2017 at 08:50
A lucid summary and I agree with every word. But what does it say about a party that i) elected such a person - and she was hardly an unknown quantity - and ii) failed so completely to temper and moderate such a disastrous combination of failings?
ShockDiamond
June 10, 2017 at 09:49
Clearly a need to reflect on the Conservatives' selection process. I guess she seemed to shine after the Gove / Johnson implosion, and the real threat that a nonentity like Andrea Leadsom could actually gain some traction. And in fairness to Cameron and Osborne, notwithsanding the electrorate's and the media's irresistable urge to label them as "toffs", they were in touch with the broad demographics. And how come in all this Labour talk of "the many" there was never a mention in the campaign of the significant amounts of cash the previous Conservative government put in the pockets of the employed by massively increasing the threshold at which income tax becomes payable (to £11800 p a + £1000 interest!)?
Theo M.
June 10, 2017 at 13:43
And yet she was the most popular leader in terms of votes and seats. In the former she did better than David Cameron who got a majority of seats. When that happened I imagine you were saying he had judged the country's mood correctly. You make some valid points about the patronising and authoritarian tone of the Tories. She is still prime minister so she must have done something right. She just didn't get the glorious victory predicted by her, her team, and the media commentators.
1. David Paterson
  June 10, 2017 at 14:19
  Implosion of UKIP, splitting its 12% vote share about 50/50 between Labour and Tories, depending on location, the feeble Lib Dem recovery and the unionist fightback in Scotland - that was all it took to take them both back above 40% like the "good" old days. Nothing that TM could claim credit for.
2. Robert Slack
  June 10, 2017 at 16:50
  Both Cons and Lab have base support, who do not look at policies or leaders. Many of "her" votes were those. Some would have been worried that not voting for her would let in Corbyn (and some people maybe vote for him to keep her out!). UKIP gave away a lot of votes and Labour picked up more than half. Even though she had a bigger vote share than Camneron, she did worse. It was always clear she was an inadequate lightweight; never more clear than when she reacted like Violet Elizabeth Bott when declaring "nothing has changed"...a lot changed at that time; her credilbility plummeted.
3. Paul N.
  June 11, 2017 at 04:03
  Theresa May went into this election with the expectation she would win a large majority if not win a landslide. Instead she lost seats and now has to depend on the good graces of the Democratic Unionist Party to prop up her government. She called an election because she claimed she wanted a stronger mandate in the face of the Brexit negotiations. What she got from the election was a weakened position and a Tory Party angry with her for throwing away a majority she would have had for three more years. She is still the Prime Minister, but many doubt she will be for much longer. In the meantime she has thrown the country into a period of political uncertainty at a truly critical moment in the country's history.
G.
June 10, 2017 at 16:25
I agree with Theo. Mrs May has not got the easy manner which I suspect made Corbyn attractive to many. The pensions issue was badly handled in the manifesto and by Mrs May. However in any election in recent decades, if a party leader had been offered 42.4% of the vote before polling day, my guess is they would have taken it. It only seems a failure in this case because of excessively high expectations and what seems to have been a great surge in the student vote. The conservatives need to look at their methods of comminication and party membership I think.
Alyson
June 11, 2017 at 04:55
Jeremy Corbyn came into this election with a clear, costed and achievable manifesto, which is popular across the political divide, including with moderate Tories who would like to keep an NHS which is free at the point of need, would like to keep good quality education, rather than cut funding, cut teachers, closing schools as well as hospitals, and lessening the life chances for young and old alike. However he did not win an outright majority and so the road ahead is rocky for whoever leads the country. Brexit is firmly back on the agenda now and the question of who will lead the country into the negotiations with Europe must be openly addressed. Theresa May has made it absolutely clear that she cannot be trusted to put the needs of the country first. The article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine showed that her gambits are known and her negotiating skills risible. These negotiations require a high calibre team such as Keir Starmer is better qualified to lead. May has relied on repetitive speeches devoid of content in this election. Her policies will sell off the country's hospitals to offshore tax havens, leaving NHS funding to go to the billionaire rentiers. She will sell profitable renewables and nuclear energy to state energy companies outside the UK. This is not in the national interest. Once we are out of the EU we will have to be more self sufficient. Theresa May's short termism in her economic plans for the country will be ruinous for all of us. Jeremy Corbyn as winner of the Ghandi Peace Prize, is the best person to lead the country. Perhaps there is some merit in his not having won a landslide victory, which he would have won, had it not been for the vicious campaigns which the Sun and Mail ran against him at the last stages. Perhaps the raised profile of the DUP and Sinn Fein will help place the importance of the border with the Republic of Ireland centre stage where it can be openly and honestly negotiated in cross party working groups. Perhaps a new era of openness and honesty can bring a return to human decency and the political middle ground.
1. J_HANNAN
  June 11, 2017 at 23:02
  I don't think you can blame the newspapers for Corbyn's defeat. I would say that the majority of the public don't trust the Left to be able to govern. The manifesto was convincing for some people, but not for most people.
geoff hill
June 11, 2017 at 14:48
I suspect that Teresa May's problem was a deal simpler than Jay Elwes' diagnosis. It's possible that she is a sincere "one nation Tory" but was forced to compromise with the "old school", the closet Little Englanders and the pro-austerity brigade - the Phantoms of the Tory Opera - in her manifesto, and since that agenda has lost them so much popular support, they need a scapegoat and a sacrifice to deflect public scrutiny away from themselves.
1. geoff hill
  June 11, 2017 at 15:17
  PS And the media and the PLP must be quite dizzy from the acrobatic twists and turns they've been making these last forty-eight hours. Watch those spaces...
S C.
June 18, 2017 at 20:32
Initially I credited May with a lot more nous than it now appears she has. She had the great advantage in the leadership election of not being Johnson, Gove or Leadstrom, each of whom gave the Tory leadership voters ample reason not to vote for them. So she was defined more by who she wasn't than who she was. At first I thought the mantra 'Brexit means Brexit' was intended to draw a veil over the details of the Government's negotiating position - it being surely sensible not to publicise too much in advance. I thought her (bizarre) statement on fox hunting to be a bone thrown to the frothing right wing of the Tory party - and the 30 or 40 MPs concerned were surely one reason she gambled on a General Election, when by increasing her majority to 80 or 100 seats (which looked possible at one point) she could safely ignore them. Alas I was wrong, but the electorate as a whole was right. May is not up to the job, and after the brickbats of the last few weeks she is probably even less so: her morale can't be high. It has become clear that the Government hasn't a clue what to do in the Brexit negotiations, or what it wants to achieve apart from the bland and unrealistic 'jam for everyone'. Corbyn may (or may not) be up to being PM, and the Labour manifesto was generous but its 'full costings' were worked out on the back of an envelope, with possible downsides brushed away. The electorate was given the choice between clueless Tories and over promising Labour, and, rationally, decided that giving the Tories another chance - with a stern ticking off - was better than giving the keys to the (mostly empty) moneybox to Labour. It's not an outcome I especially like, but given where we are, possibly the best there can be.