No snarling. No hysterics. Theresa isn’t built like that
LAST weeks before an election are normally shouty and frenetic: balloons, loudhailers, loopy overstatement. Not with Theresa May. The Tory leader, conceding she was pretty hopeless at touchy-feely pizzazz, opted yesterday morning for a quiet, serious speech about Brexit, the national interest and how we should respond to violent attacks.
Jeremy Corbyn’s weakness on terrorism made him unsuitable for high office, she argued. She did not shout that from the battlements or snarl it with a publicschool Flashman’s malevolence.
She stated it without hysterics , from a lectern, a professional, middle-aged woman addressing an audience of foreign-affairs chinstrokers.
To thine own self be true, wrote Shakespeare. For good or ill, Mrs May has followed that advice. She has not jumped on a soap box, John Major- style. She has not smacked her hands together and said ‘hell yeah’, as David Cameron and Ed Miliband used to do. She has not (yet) punched a voter, like that vigorous stump artiste John Prescott. She has just stuck to her arguments, played it calm, kept it to a line and length. Boring? Yes. But calm.
Tory candidates in marginal constituencies might have wanted her to leap on a flat-back lorry and promise tax cuts and pay rises and double toffee rations with more bank holidays.
We sketchwriters have been driven nuts by the unshowy Tory campaign. I keep waking up in the middle of the night, chewing my fist – and on one occasion my wife’s fist, sorry darling – at the thought of having to write another article about sober Theresa on the campaign trail.
Could she not give us a few more jokes? Whack the occasional six into the grandstand? Do a Boris? But Auntie May is not built like that. You can no more ask her to gush than you can ask a sea lion to play the piano.
SHEarrived yesterday morning at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), having come from various emergency counter-terrorism meetings at Downing Street. Even in a campaign, the duties of government continue.
her voice was deeper than usual – she sounded as though she had eaten a packet of cigarillos for breakfast – and she had applied a lot of eyeliner. It lent a certain Lily Munster quality to her complexion. The event was held in the RUSI Library, where last summer she launched her campaign to lead the Tory party. Behind her on the bookshelves: biographies of Kitchener, Kissinger, Dubcek, De Gaulle and more. her audience included spooks, civil servants, foreign scholars.
A big problem with this Tory campaign has been that it has not projected the party as the agents of Brexit change, which they certainly are.
Labour has tapped into youth iconoclasm, despite being the party of dreary Establishment bores who want to keep us bound up with the EU. Mrs May’s caution has allowed that wrong impression to blossom.
But there is an upside to her staid approach and it was evident yesterday: she was composed, stolid, grown-up. She did not pucker up to the cam- era lenses. She did not accept press invitations to slag off Donald Trump for shortterm electoral buzz – but long- term damage to the nation’s prospects.
She repeated admissions she made a year ago when she stood for party leader. ‘I’m not a showy politician. I don’t gossip about people over lunch. I don’t go drinking in bars. I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve. But if ever there was a time for a Prime Minister who is ready and able to do the job from day one, this is it.’
Unlike Mr Corbyn, she said, she fully supported the right of the police to shoot dead terrorists who were running rampant. On Saturday in London that had ‘saved countless lives’. She wanted to give the police more powers. Mr Corbyn wanted to rein them in. ‘I think that’s all people need to know.’
She has certainly done it her own way. Early on Friday we will find out if she was right.