How Theresa May the control freak froze under scrutiny and invited her own destruction
LIKE one of Shakespeare’s great tragic heroes, the seeds of Theresa May’s downfall were there even at the moment of her greatest triumph.
When all others fell around her on the Brexit battlefield, the complex characteristics which made up the then home secretary’s psyche appeared as strengths. Today those same attributes have resulted in perhaps the worst misstep ever taken by a sitting British prime minister.
Back in the aftermath of the EU referendum, 11 long months ago, May seemed a grown-up among pygmies, a solid, grounded figure, not given to the political games being played by the public schoolboys David Cameron, George Osborne, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. Yet her deficit of charisma turned out to be a stumbling block in the campaign. When the bright lights of the television studio proved blinding rather than illuminating, her lack of nimbleness became a handicap when she was required to think on her feet. Her diffidence with media and public became excruciating rather than refreshing.
Above all, May craves control. When called upon to take charge, as she was last year, she rose to the challenge. But the need to be in control became a fatal flaw when she lost. So when the response to the Tory manifesto was a resounding thumbs down, or when Jeremy Corbyn proved not to be the pushover she had expected, or even when asked a question which required her to deviate off script — as with the unwelcome inquiries about police cuts following the terror attacks — she panicked.
In a prime minister, that panic manifests itself as withdrawal, a turning in on herself, a freezing up. As a more junior minister, she had a tendency to remove herself from the field when wounded. That proved impossible during these last few weeks when the eyes of the nation were on her. Her visible discomfort and insecurity during the campaign swiftly gave lie to the carefully crafted slogan of “strong and stable”.
Where Cameron thrived on adversity — he would relish being heckled, seeing it as an opportunity to turn a situation around — May’s response to being challenged was truculence. Not exactly a vote winner.
Like the emperor’s new clothes, May’s very ordinariness, which seemed a boon when Cameron’s gilt began to chip, became exposed as emptiness. Her tale of running through fields of wheat as a naughty schoolgirl seemed slightly weird and a little embarrassing, not the charming anecdote she had been pitching for.
It’s the control thing again. May has long relied on a tiny inner circle of advisers. Trusting no one on the outside, failing to delegate, seeking no advice and heeding no warnings served her well at the fortress that is the Home Office. But the vastness of the prime minister’s brief makes it an impossibility to govern alone.
Warning voices that might have helped her were silenced. They were not listened to when she told those unlucky enough to develop dementia that they should sell their homes to pay for their care.
An authority figure became authoritarian when she — quite literally — refused to debate her ideas, ducking out of the TV debates, or demanded unswerving loyalty in the Brexit talks without sharing any sense of what direction she would take.
As May trembles on the brink of losing her crown, which Shakespearean tragi-hero is it she most resembles? Not the indecision of Hamlet; that honour goes to Gordon Brown (the ex-prime minister May is most alike) with his “To be or not be-ing” over the election-thatnever-was a decade ago.
She is more Macbeth, with her advisers Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy cast as twin Lady Macbeths, urging her to act on her ambition, to wield the knife by calling an election the public soon detected served little purpose than her own advancement. —©The Daily Telegraph, London
Prince is the author of ‘Theresa May: the Enigmatic Prime Minister’