QUIET REVOLUTION
In 100 days, Mrs May has transformed the way we’re ruled, and unveiled a new politics that puts the interests of a sovereign Britain and its people before greedy corporations and arrogant elites. But she faces terrifying challenges ahead . . .
OFTEN, as Big Ben chimes 1.30am, a light can be seen burning in the Downing Street flat where Theresa May lives with her husband Philip. Mrs May likes to work on government papers late into the night.
For the 60-year-old Prime Minister is a woman who never reaches a decision until she has mastered the details and evaluated the consequences.
This is a matter of frustration to civil servants and Cabinet Ministers — but at least no one is in doubt as to who is in charge.
She was, of course, catapulted into Downing Street following the historic decision by the British people to leave the European Union.
This means that Mrs May’s mission is to manage the greatest political and economic upheaval in postwar British history. It is a colossal challenge because, although supported by the majority of voters, Brexit is viscerally opposed by Britain’s financial, social and economic elite. They wield enormous power, and many are determined to thwart the referendum result.
The question now is whether the PM can steer the ship of state through this most revolutionary — and dangerous — political period.
Yesterday, Mrs May completed her 100th day in office. So what have we learned about her so far?
First and foremost: she is unflappable. Mrs May is at home in her job. It is as if she has planned for it all her life. Her election as Conservative Party leader within weeks of Brexit sent out a deeply reassuring message that the nation is in capable hands.
Had any of her rivals captured the premiership, there would have been chaos inside the Tory Party and in the wider country. Not with Mrs May as leader. She has established herself as a force for calm and good sense in the frenzied, unreal world of Westminster.
Mrs May is normal. This paradoxically makes her all the more unusual in her job. She is not a woman who enjoys the trappings of high office. She has put a stop to the celebrity Downing Street parties beloved of both Tony Blair and David Cameron.
The lavish and deeply distasteful Conservative Party fund-raising balls, patronised by City slickers, dodgy businessmen and media crawlers, have become a thing of the past.
These changes have led to criticism. One metropolitan commentator from a fashionable newspaper recently sneered that she has failed to deliver memorable soundbites.
THIS shows how completely such opinionformers fail to understand the new PM. She does not surround herself with clever spin doctors who see the primary task of government as being to manage the media.
There is no equivalent in her inner circle to Tony Blair’s cynical and mendacious propaganda chief Alastair Campbell, or David Cameron’s self-serving strategy director ‘Sir’ Craig Oliver.
‘We no longer design policy with an eye on the Six O’Clock News,’ says one senior Downing Street official.
Traditional Cabinet government has been restored after a long period of abeyance under Tony Blair and David Cameron, both of whom preferred to make decisions in secret with the help of a small, self-appointed inner group of cronies.
In sharp contrast, Mrs May has restored the importance of Cabinet sub-committees, where policy is discussed in great detail, and decisions reached on their merits.
This change of style has been reflected in rearrangement of the Downing Street furniture. Tony Blair’s notorious sofas have been jettisoned — and replaced with desks.
Sir Jeremy Heywood, the longserving Cabinet secretary dubbed Sir Cover-Up — whose political neutrality has often been questioned — still plays a vital role at the heart of government. But it is diminished.
Mrs May, say insiders, no longer exploits him as an emotional crutch and political henchman, which was his role under Blair, Brown and Cameron.
Sir Jeremy is kept out of political meetings, and is no longer an obtrusive figure — a strong sign that integrity is being brought back to British government.
It is also refreshing to learn that Mrs May has only rarely used Chequers, the grand country house which is official weekend residence of Prime Ministers. Instead, she prefers to return to her constituency in Maidenhead in the British home counties. On Saturday mornings (to the consternation of her security officers), she is often to be found knocking on doors at the homes of her local constituents.
Friends say she listens very carefully indeed to what they say. Voters in the council houses of Maidenhead, they add, have more influence on the direction of policy than business lobbyists and the ubiquitous party donors who exerted such power over Blair and Cameron.
In sharp exception to her predecessors, she does not enjoy expensive holidays courtesy of rich patrons from the world of City PR or high finance.
Mrs May and her husband, Philip, preferred a modest walking holiday in the Swiss Alps last summer to anything more glamorous.
But what really matters, of course, is how she conducts affairs at Westminster. Civil servants say that the sudden change of government from Cameron to May is far more revolutionary and profound than that which would normally be caused by a General Election.
One observer compares the change of tone inside Downing Street to the 2005 switch in Germany from the slick, mediafriendly and corrupt Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, to the downto-earth mother of the nation Angela Merkel.
What there has been is a huge change in the tone and texture of the nation’s administration.
I’d also argue that there’s been a profound shift in the substance of government.
Within moments of taking office, after kissing the Queen’s hand on July 13, the new PM set out her guiding objectives.
Her words were as pregnant with significance as Maggie Thatcher’s invocation of St Francis Assisi — in explaining her aim to bring harmony amid discord — as she entered Downing Street in 1979.
Mrs May’s remarks are so important that they are worth quoting in full.
‘The government I lead will be driven not by the interests of the privileged few but by yours. We will do everything we can to give
you more control over your lives. When we take the big calls we’ll think not of the powerful but you. When we pass new laws we’ll listen not to the mighty, but you. When it comes to taxes, we’ll prioritise not the wealthy, but you.
‘When it comes to opportunity we won’t entrench the advantages of the fortunate few. We’ll do everything we can to help anybody, whatever your background, to go as far as your talents will take you.’
This statement was, in effect, a total repudiation of the Blair/Cameron era, when policy was formed to a disgraceful extent by wealthy lobbyists and amoral businessmen. Mrs May is therefore the first PM since Labour’s Jim Callaghan 40 years ago to signal a readiness to challenge the dominant City of London — a message she fleshed out with an eloquent attack on tax avoidance in her flagship Tory conference speech in Birmingham.
The new PM has entered into an alliance with the mass of British voters against the powerful vested interests that dictated the terms of British public life for 30 years.
This means that Mrs May’s political philosophy challenges the very existence of the system which has shaped the world since the Eighties. This system has placed international corporations and the too-often venal values of the marketplace ahead of local communities, institutions and especially the nation state.
This existing system — called globalisation by economists — insists on free movement not merely of money and goods, but also of peoples. There is no question that the advent of globalisation has created huge wealth for some. However it has come with huge cost.
In this ‘globalised’ world of free markets with no natural borders, countless British jobs have gone abroad. Meanwhile, millions of immigrants have taken work here, forcing down wages, and numerous national institutions such as energy companies and airports have been bought by foreign firms.
The result has been that wealth is concentrated in the hands of very few, while the majority have been left far behind. Living standards have been falling sharply, not just in Britain but right across the West.
Many communities, for example in the North of England, have been deprived of hope and opportunity. Traditional identities — both local and national — have been erased.
A new, international cabal — represented by rapacious businessmen such as Sir Philip Green and politicians such as Tony Blair (who, no coincidence, gave Green a knighthood) — has emerged to champion this new world order.
That’s why I believe the Brexit vote in June was about much more than the European Union. It was fundamentally an expression of distaste for a deeply divisive international order which has put the interests of the rich and powerful above ordinary people.
Mrs May showed that she understood this point when she told Conservative activists, in a remark which infuriated international financial high-flyers, that ‘if you’re a citizen of the world you are a citizen of nowhere’. For those who commute between penthouses in Mayfair, villas in Monaco and flats in Manhattan, this was a deadly warning.
During her early months in office, Mrs May has shown through force of words that she understands the nature of our contemporary national predicament better than almost any other modern politician.
The question now, however, is can she turn these words into actions? Nobody knows.
The task is massive. For Mrs May is reasserting the importance of national government as a force which can help ordinary people to defend their livelihoods against predatory international markets.
This is the reason why she favours ideas which you might ordinarily think were Left-wing, such as putting workers on company boards and a targeting of tax avoidance so that the very wealthy pay tax in the same the way that everyone else does.
All this means that it is already possible to speak of a political philosophy called Mayism. It contains socially conservative ideas — such as an end to the ban on new grammar schools — which are more daring than any a politician has advocated for 50 years.
BUT it is also informed by the recognition that the state has a positive role to play in standing up for ordinary people against global capitalism.
Mayism therefore occupies what the late Sir Keith Joseph, mentor to Margaret Thatcher, labelled the ‘common ground’ — not the centre ground — of British politics.
Above all, she seeks to speak for hard-working people whose voices are very rarely heard at Westminster.
Mayism is a doctrine which can appeal not just to Labour voters who feel disenfranchised by Jeremy Corbyn, but also the Ukip voters who abandoned the Conservative Party in their millions under David Cameron.
In essence, it is a kind of one-nation Toryism which aims to attract aspirational voters, particularly in the lowermiddle and working classes, as Mrs Thatcher once did.
Above all, Theresa May is reaffirm- ing the significance of patriotism — hated by many on the Left, and long sneered at by the global elites who have shaped British politics.
In setting out such a potent political philosophy, she has already made formidable enemies, and the real battle has not even been joined.
Some of the most powerful of these enemies are within Mrs May’s own Conservative Party.
Former Chancellor George Osborne is the unofficial leader of the opposition to Brexit, and he enjoys useful support not just in the City, but also in the BBC and many other branches of the mainstream media.
City grandees, of course, lobbied furiously against Brexit, and are on the whole all for the free movement of people into this country — either to come and work in their banks, or to clean their houses.
The Left-leaning BBC, as well as the highly-paid liberal quangocracy, are still appalled by the prospect of Britain leaving the EU, as well the idea of determined reductions in net migration.
In the face of such formidable opposition, Mrs May’s strongest card is the support of the British people. That is why I believe that at some stage she would be wise to call a General Election to establish once and for all her legitimacy to govern.
SUCH an election would put to voters the simple question: who runs Britain?
Will Mrs May succeed in her mission? It is far too early to tell. One major worry concerns the calibre of her team. When Mrs Thatcher set about reinventing Britain in the Eighties she was surrounded by political giants — Michael Heseltine, Norman Tebbit, Geoffrey Howe, Nigel Lawson, Ken Clarke and others.
Mrs May lacks a ministerial squad of anything like this stature, and this is a cause for alarm. Partly for this reason, the PM’s decision-making has at times been shaky.
Her reputation for decisiveness was damaged by the pusillanimous announcement that the decision on whether to build a new runway at Heathrow airport had been kicked into long grass yet again.I believe that she was mistaken not to cancel George Osborne’s massively expensive plan for the HS2 high- speed train from London to the North.
So the truth is that it is far too early to state that Mrs May will make a success as Prime Minister. All that can be said at this stage is that she has got off to a strong start.
She has called time on the Blair/Cameron era, and set about bringing back rectitude to public administration. She has talked in language which is connecting with ordinary people.
She has become Prime Minister with the wisdom that comes from long experience of political office.
Her emergence at a relatively late age marks the end, too, of the cult of political youth which has done such damage to this country for the past 30 years. (Blair and Cameron were both 43 when they took office.) She will need all these advantages, and a great deal of luck.
Mrs May has become Prime Minister in what is, frankly, a time of crisis. The very ordinary woman has set out on a truly extraordinary journey.
Which is why, when she sits alone reading government papers in the small hours of the morning — perhaps with her preferred mixture of orange juice and lemonade at her elbow — Mrs May is working out plans to change the course of history itself.