How she CAN find a voice for Britain ( )
. . . and no need for cough sweets this time, says the man who wrote the speech plagued by misfortune last year
ExACTLY a year ago, I grabbed a laptop and locked myself away in a Manchester hotel room to write Prime Minister Theresa May’s party conference speech. Having been her strategy director and chief speechwriter until I left a couple of months earlier, after the General Election, this was a familiar task. I had crafted such speeches before.
For example, I had written the words the Prime Minister delivered when she met Donald Trump at the White House. I had drafted her speech for the World Economic Summit in Davos and her words at Lancaster House last year when she set out her Brexit vision.
But the stakes for this one could not have been higher. The General Election debacle was fresh in everyone’s memory. Mrs May’s gamble to try to increase her Commons majority had backfired humiliatingly. Now, her very survival as Prime Minister hung in the balance. She needed her party conference speech to make an impact and get the British public behind her.
What actually happened certainly achieved that — but not in the way we had intended.
The catalogue of disasters that befell Mrs May — a coughing fit, a lost voice, an infantile intruder who handed her a spoof P45 and letters falling off the slogan on the wall behind her — delivered a message that was much, much stronger than any of my words on her autocue.
That message was: whatever is thrown at Theresa Mary May, she will not buckle.
Such an excruciating public experience might have destroyed a lesser man or woman. But not this vicar’s daughter.
Her wounds suffered by the General Election setback were still raw. She was angry that the campaign had misrepresented her as an automaton who refused to participate in any TV debates.
In the run-up to the Tory conference, she had confided in me: ‘I am in politics to give a voice to those who feel they are voiceless. I want this speech to tell people that.’
Her team had wanted to make her speech personal for another key reason.
In the wake of the election result four months earlier, which had wiped out the Tories’ Commons majority, a stunned Government and Conservative hierarchy seemed to have no strategy beyond simple survival.
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MrS May’s conference speech had to be personal because there was little else to say. This was due to the paralysis that was crippling the party.
It had begun with the election result and continues to enfeeble the party today. Indeed, memories of election night in June last year will for ever be seared in my memory.
Just a minute before the exit poll was published, the Tory team had gathered in the ‘war room’ at Conservative Party HQ, gearing up to celebrate what was expected to be a triumphant result.
Upstairs, the drinks were flowing. All around were smiling faces: despite the missteps during the campaign, it seemed the gamble of calling a surprise election had worked.
I stood under a TV screen and waited. All we needed was for the exit poll to predict the convincing victory we expected, and the May Government could continue in power with her authority and majority increased.
However, we were left stunned and disbelieving.
David Dimbleby told the nation: ‘The Conservatives are the largest party, but they don’t have an overall majority.’
Theresa May’s gamble, hoping to increase the Tories’ majority, had failed miserably, it seemed. Dimbleby said the exit poll predicted 17 fewer Conservative MPs and that Labour would gain 34 more seats.
Not for the first time in recent history, the public had taken the political world completely by surprise.
We quickly scrambled to decide what to do next.
Would the Prime Minister stay on? If not, would the Queen ask Jeremy Corbyn to form a government? And would the exit poll actually prove to be accurate?
As such questions were asked — and often left unanswered — a colleague turned to me with a look of horror in their eyes. ‘Oh my God,’ they said. ‘I think we just screwed Brexit.’
To me, that seemed a strange reaction. I felt that our priority was how we could shore up Mrs May’s position against Jeremy Corbyn’s hard-Left.
But others felt differently. The fate of Brexit was at risk, and this was more important than anything else.
This is a view that continues to dominate the Conservative Party’s thinking. Indeed, Brexit has been elevated to religious status. As a result, the Government’s wider domestic agenda, in which the Prime Minister passionately believes, has been sidelined.
This shouldn’t be the case. Brexit ought not to be so allconsuming that little room is left for ministers to focus on other things.
Michael Gove at the Department for the Environment, Food and rural Affairs, for example, has shown it is still possible to get things done if the will is there. The fact is that many of the issues and concerns that underpinned the Brexit vote need to be addressed separately with bold thinking and a programme of reform. This is what the Prime Minister should focus on next week.
Mrs May correctly diagnosed those concerns during her first year in Downing Street. She spoke powerfully about tackling ‘burning injustices’, taking on rogue businesses and others who abuse their positions, and doing more to spread prosperity and equality of opportunity to all parts of the country.
She said politicians had to stop ducking the big decisions and ignoring uncomfortable issues such as immigration. As a result, Mrs May’s popularity soared in the opinion polls.
Yet, as a book published this week by the political scientists Philip Cowley and Dennis Kavanagh shows, these ideas were absent from the 2017 General Election campaign and jettisoned entirely from the Government’s programme soon after.
This happened because certain voices had argued that nothing must get in the way of achieving Brexit, a cause they had spent so much of their political lives working for.
However, the consequences of that decision are potentially fatal for the Tories.
The Government is convulsed over a single issue, while the Labour Party — like much of the rest of the country — has other worries.
In politics, if you want to define yourself by a single issue, you must ensure it is one that’s overwhelmingly popular and on which you can win. Brexit — which split the country 52/48 — is neither.
While opinion polls suggest that the 52/48 division has changed little since the June 2016 vote, the consequences and impact of Brexit are anything but clear.
What is clear is that the Conservative Party does not have much support among younger voters, who overwhelmingly backed remain. Black and ethnic minority voters, who also largely favoured remain, rarely vote Tory. research shows that women are losing faith in Brexit and turning towards ‘remain’, too.
Nevertheless, the Tory party, driven by Brexit obsessives, appears to be consumed with this one issue that attracts increasingly little public engagement and ultimately even fewer friends.
Of course, the Government must deliver Brexit, but it is foolish for it to be seen to be doing it in a strident way that alienates voters.
Winston Churchill, whom Brexiteers are fond of quoting, knew very well the fickleness of the public and that there is scant gratitude in politics — having been voted out of power despite winning World War II.
Voters rarely thank you for what you have done in the past. It’s what they think you’ll do in the future that matters.
So, as Theresa May prepares Wednesday’s speech, these are the realities that should concentrate her mind.
As well as affirming her commitment to deliver on the result of the EU referendum, she needs urgently to engage with the British people about other issues.
Jeremy Corbyn engaged with wider policies last week — vowing to ‘save’ the NHS, increase house-building, end the public sector pay cap, close the gender pay gap, nationalise the rail, mail, energy and water sectors, and invest in a ‘green economy’.
Mrs May must outline her vision for the type of postBrexit Britain she wants and make people feel it will be a better Britain than the one we live in today.
First, she has to give a frank and honest appraisal of the Brexit process and its likely
MrsMaymust makeusfeel ournationwillbe betterafterBrexit
outcome. We can no longer pretend it is possible to have it all.
Whatever people were promised during the referendum campaign, the process is difficult and further compromises are necessary.
Britain entered negotiations with Brussels with a weak hand. As such, it is close to remarkable that so much of the Withdrawal Agreement has already been sealed.
Yet, as we saw when Mrs May was ambushed by fellow European leaders in Salzburg last week, the next phase of the talks is sure to be the most difficult. This is not a surprise. Little has happened during the negotiations that was not predicted by civil servants and No 10 advisers. Honesty would mean acknowledging that her so-called Chequers plan is not set in stone and may only be a basis for negotiations. Despite the posturing by many of the other 27 EU leaders, they may eventually budge. But we must do so, too.
Moreover, the weaknesses of the Chequers deal are its decreasing popularity among Tories, the way Labour is brutally exploiting those splits, and the fact it hasn’t been explained well enough to the public. Now is the time to explain and fight for it in the hope it is not too late.
Mrs May must also make it clear that Brexit is just one of many Government priorities. She must re- emphasise what she told the nation on her first day in Downing Street, when she said: ‘ The government I lead will be driven not by the interests of the privileged few, but by yours.’
Her belief then was that Brexit would change not only this country’s relationship with the EU, but the way the country works internally, too. She recognised that, while Westminster is fascinated by technical arguments about the single market and the customs union, for most people, Brexit is about much, much more.
The Leave vote was based on a sense that things were not working as they should and that something needed to change. Brexit, it was hoped, offered a chance to look at everything anew.
This philosophy resonated with focus groups and polling that was carried out by Downing Street staff at the time.
TIME and again, people said they wanted to hear less about the process of Brexit and more about how the Government would take this opportunity to make the country work in a fairer way. They say the same thing today.
Thus, Mrs May should explain how she will take on those who abuse their power — the monopolies and the cartels that operate in an anti- competitive way. She should say how she’ll fix broken markets and ensure that customers are put first.
There should be a renewed commitment to the school reforms of the kind that have already transformed outcomes for pupils and helped close the attainment gap between rich and poor.
We need, also, to hear more about how the Government’s industrial strategy will ensure the country’s prosperity can be shared more widely — with high-paid, highskilled jobs brought to communities that have been neglected for too long.
Mrs May should outline an ambitious agenda to tackle the generation divide, with a package of reforms to support young people: for example, getting to grips with the failing housing market that currently means too few young people can get on to the housing ladder, and improving skills training.
This is the kind of radical agenda the Tories need to see off a reinvigorated Labour Party.
For, make no mistake, the old divide in British politics is back. The hard-Left is on the march and Jeremy Corbyn would bring to this country a form of Venezuelan socialism, red in tooth and claw.
The danger is this may look attractive when there is nothing on offer from the other side.
The Conservatives need to wake up and stop the Corbynistas taking control of Britain.
But that can only be achieved by doing much more than by delivering Brexit alone.