REMEMBER, THEY ALSO WROTE OFF MAGGIE
WeLL, you can’t say theresa May isn’t resilient. there were times in her train crash of a speech when she could have been forgiven for throwing her notes in the air, walking off stage and never coming back.
although I found parts almost excruciatingly unwatchable, I can’t deny that for sheer human drama, there has probably never been a conference speech quite like it.
Forget the conservatives versus Labour. this was a more fundamental battle: one woman, in the full glare of the national spotlight, soldiering on against the cruelty of fate.
the metropolitan chattering classes were naturally beside themselves with glee, cackling about how the speech was a metaphor for Mrs May’s political fortunes.
Perhaps they were right — but not, I suspect, for the reasons they think.
they have, after all, been writing the Prime Minister off for months. She was going to resign within days of the general election, they said. then she would be gone by the end of the summer. then she would be gone by the party conference. But she’s still there.
Mrs May is not, of course, the most emollient political presence. nobody would describe her as one of life’s natural entertainers. She lacks David cameron’s slick smoothness in front of the cameras, let alone Jeremy corbyn’s unerring instinct for pandering to his listeners’ prejudices. But what yesterday proved beyond doubt is that she is a fighter.
the test of a leader, she said, is ‘when tough times come upon you’. and what was the real story here? the voice that nearly gave out? or the woman who never gave up?
how appropriate, then, that one of her key themes was duty. after all, could there have been a better symbol of her dedication to duty than battling on, despite the squabbling of colleagues, the interruption of an imbecilic prankster and the handicap of her own hoarse voice?
Indeed, could there have been a more painfully visible reminder that despite the cruel caricatures peddled by the Left, the Prime Minister is a human being, subject to the frailties that afflict all the rest of us?
She had told us as much earlier, talking of her struggle with diabetes and her sadness that she and her husband had not been blessed with children. But none of this, I suspect, will resonate as much with the public as her determination and resilience yesterday.
the irony, of course, is that all the drama has banished the details of what she actually said.
Yet the basic principles were sound enough. Mrs May was surely right to talk of ‘re-igniting home ownership’, the foundation of any property-owning democracy, although I think an additional £2 billion to build affordable housing does not yet go far enough.
Some tories will cavil at the thought of a cap on energy prices, even though it has long been trailed. But there has always been more to conservatism than free-market fundamentalism, and those with long memories will recall that Margaret thatcher once pledged to cap mortgage rates, which would be unthinkable today.
the Prime Minister was right to promise a review of student finances. She was right, too, to condemn the appalling misogyny and anti-Semitism that has infected much of the Labour Left, as well as Jeremy corbyn’s contemptible support for the blooddrenched regime in Venezuela.
Yet since Mrs May is nothing if not cautious, she always gives the impression of slightly pulling her punches.
earlier this week, re-reading some of Margaret thatcher’s conference speeches as research for a book, I was struck by the vehemence of her denunciations of the hard Left. By these standards, Mrs May seems positively restrained. and although I still think a corbyn premiership would be a political and economic disaster of incalculable proportions, her approach may well be right.
as she said herself, politics in the last couple of years has too often been poisoned by hatred and vitriol, particularly from the Left.
and if the conservatives are to win an election in 2022, they will only do so with a positive message of their own, rather than just by warning of the calamitous consequences of a corbynista government.
the real question, though — one that has dominated every conference conversation — is who will lead them into that election.
ACCORDING to the conventional wisdom of the metropolitan commentators, Mrs May’s chances of doing so are zero. Really? I wonder. there are, in fact, remarkably few examples of Prime Ministers walking away voluntarily, not least since political fortunes can revive as quickly as they decline.
In 1981, for example, Mrs thatcher was considered to be finished, the most unpopular Prime Minister since records began. and yet just two years later, buoyed by victory in the Falklands and a booming economy, she won the most decisive landslide since 1945.
another example is Labour’s harold Wilson. he benefited from an inflated political honeymoon, narrowly winning the 1964 election and then a much more comfortable one two years later. then, as the pound tanked and strikes mounted, Wilson’s reputation imploded. By the end of 1966, most agreed that he was a dead man walking. according to the chattering classes, the only questions were when his colleagues would kick him out, and which one would replace him.
Funnily enough, things didn’t quite work out that way. Wilson led Labour into three more elections, two of which he won, and retired as Prime Minister at a time of his own choosing.
It would be a brave man, I know, who predicted similar for Mrs May. But I suspect she has more staying power than her opponents realise.
Who, after all, is going to replace her? Boris Johnson? after the week he’s had — the blatant attention- seeking, the endless manoeuvring over Brexit, the tasteless quip about clearing away dead bodies in Libya and the palpable exasperation of his ministerial colleagues — I don’t think so.
although no sane observer would dispute that her speech was one of the most extraordinary fiascos in the history of party conferences, Mrs May knows that the overwhelming majority of the British people don’t read the sneering columns in the liberal Press.
as she reminded her conference, ‘beyond this hall, beyond the gossip pages of the newspapers, and beyond the streets, corridors and meeting rooms of Westminster, life continues — the daily lives of ordinary working people go on’.
What will those ordinary working people have seen yesterday? I suspect they will have seen a woman who never gives up. For even as her speech tipped into chaos, Mrs May didn’t walk away. She kept going, the embodiment of duty to the bitter end.
the irony, therefore, may be that even though yesterday was like something from Mrs May’s worst nightmares, it could work in her favour. If nothing else, the British people love a fighter.
and if, in a few years’ time, she is still there, battling for Britain, we might just look back on yesterday’s fiasco as one of the strangest turning points in our modern political history.