Saucy Theresa May shares the blame for Tory meltdown

Among words I never thought I’d write are: “You’ve got to laugh at Theresa May.” 

I was at a portrait exhibition the other day at which hers stared from the wall. If her expression could be summed up in a word it was ‘humourless’. ‘Misunderstood’ came in a close second. The vaguely hurt look of one voted head girl at the beginning of term and driven from the common room by a barrage of inky pellets and laughter by Christmas. 

She came in like a lion. “Sound familiar?” she goaded Jeremy Corbyn at one PMQs as though the Sainted Margaret smiled down ethereally just above her shoulder. And left like a lamb. Blubbing like one having the head girl tie pin removed by an angry headmistress for being found running through a farmer’s corn in her school blazer. 

I couldn’t help but laugh y’see because, in advance of her retirement,  she’s been ‘interviewed by journalists at Westminster’, during the course of which she has suggested that Tory travails are all the fault of class rotter Johnson B and Tyke minx Liz Truss, ties askew and catapult elastic dangling from their back pockets. 

Few would suggest that either bestride British politics like a colossus. One rarely did his homework and held dorm cake parties while the other failed maths and probably killed the Queen. Well, it was something like that anyway.

But, as with many people who pride themselves on their seriousness, May cannot be. To invert John McEnroe. 

It appears she’s forgotten a few things. Like her inability to “get Brexit done”. A project in which she didn’t believe, her idea of the British bulldog approach to Michel Barnier was to roll over and beg for scraps. Untrustworthy near Europe’s dinner tables, she was often left outside. 

Seeking to give ‘em all a learning, she called an election at which she lost her majority, helped by an ill-timed “dementia tax”, a proposition often associated with memory loss.

Meanwhile, Gina Miller scored a spectacular own goal by forcing May to constantly seek Parliamentary approval on Europe negotiations. Unable to quietly sign off a “nothing has changed” deal with “our European allies”, she found herself in thrall to a Parliament that went on to disgrace democracy, all the while telling us that the “people’s voice is sovereign”.

Agony among her own party, pain from Labour. And from those Labour pains was born Boris. 

A peculiarity of sensible centrists is that they often create the thing they hate. This is largely because they know better. And their heedlessness has consequences. 

All of which moves matters neatly to Rishi Sunak who May praises for “bringing stability”. Thus proving the theory of relativity.

Decrying the social media-inspired “expectation of celebrity”, even among politicians, she feels both Sunak, and by implication she, have suffered at its hands. Up to a point, fair point. An idea of service as opposed to CV-building seems reasonable enough but that doesn’t excuse a dearth of personality. It inspires, you see. Un fonctionnaire est pour fonctionner but, being distinct from civil servants, politicians are there to lead and implicit in that is the ability to brew the emotional fuel for the practical journey.   

May failed on that point.

It’s easy for a PM who struggled in tumultuous times to accuse all others of sailing the ship perilously close to the rocks. The truth is, for a good spell she was captain. Certainly for longer than Liz Truss. 

Another truth is that no Tory master has handled the vessel well since Cap’n Thatcher, whose ghost still haunts the SS Conservative. The party of business never really thought about succession planning as they rushed from one mutiny to the next and for whom the jagged reef is always Europe.

And so, with the boat close to breaking up, we finish where we started. With unlikely combinations. As the late, great Frankie Howerd would have said: “You’ve got to admire her sauce.”