The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Storm clouds gathering for PM
So far, so awful. When it comes to Theresa May’s television appearances, I’m with Brenda from Bristol. Oh no, not another one. Who told Mrs May speaking like an answering machine message was a good idea?
I have had the habit of an ex-newspaper journalist of overdosing on general election coverage for decades now. I think this one may cure me.
If this election could have decided not just who gets elected but also amicably sorted out Brexit and delivered Scottish independence all at once, I could see a reason for it. But as our lop-sided democracy has not yet invented such a multi-tasking option, the reason for this election has so far eluded me completely.
Crusade
Theresa May has taken what was arguably a position of strength when she became Prime Minister and turned it into a monomaniacal crusade, the single theme of which is the greater glory of Theresa May.
Nothing and no one else matters, including old people if her manifesto is to be believed.
It is a message not lost on those hapless, glum-faced losers who peopled her cabinet before she let loose the dogs of electoral war, and who are now wondering where they’ll be working next month. You’re crazy if you don’t think the plotting to bring her down has already begun.
I was thinking about the particularly gruesome nature of her performance thus far, comparing it with a few other stinkers I’ve seen over the years, and I have come to the conclusion it is without doubt the worst, the most unflattering, the most self-worshiping general election performance I have ever seen.
The truly bewildering part of it all is there are some apparently otherwise sane people out there who are swallowing it whole, and stopping just short of proclaiming her Messiah.
When she walked on stage for her manifesto launch I half expected the strewing of palm branches.
Do you remember the woman who used to gatecrash the end of the Morecambe and Wise Show with the words: “I’d like to thank all of you for watching me and my little show, so until we meet again, goodnight and I love you all!” ? That’s who she reminded me of at the end of her manifesto speech.
But aesthetics and presentation apart, there is the damage she can do, some of which is already done.
It is hardly surprising such a personality is already floundering among some infinitely wiser and smarter European leaders in pursuit of a solution to the Brexit problem (a problem, it should be pointed out, her party needlessly invented).
At every turn it makes enemies out of friends and Britain’s standing in Europe will take decades to recover.
The no-deal-is-better-than-a-bad-deal bottom line she is willing to settle for is symptomatic of just how far from the concept of rational thought she has actually strayed.
New direction?
Having subscribed to the doctrine of Scottish independence since before I was old enough to vote, and having been given some informal instruction by the late Dr Robert McIntyre in my twenties, my overriding concern is Mrs May’s thinly veiled contempt for Scotland’s nationhood ambition, which she sees as a kind of truculent puppy tugging at the end of its leash because it wants to go in a different direction.
Anti-Scottishness has been alive and well to one extent or another in the Conservative and Unionist Party forever but this particular Theresa May ego trip, with its “give me the mandate and let’s all go forward together” mantra, has set a sinister pitch which does not augur well.
It has all the hallmarks of a long, slow road to nowhere.
It takes no great imagination to envisage that along the way, she will establish herself as Prime Minister of a friendless and disunited kingdom shorn of Scotland and cut off from mainland Europe.
Presidential
The best hope for Britain – all of Britain – is that she is not allowed to travel too far along that particular way.
The cult of the domineering selfstyled presidential personality has never gone down particularly well in British politics, and the fall is always more spectacular than the rise.
There is a great deal of talk in Conservative circles at the moment about the civil war within the Labour Party.
But Mrs May’s Conservative and Unionist Party has just gone through the Cameron legacy like a one-woman wrecking ball.
“Strong and stable” is already beginning to sound less like an election-wining slogan and more like an epitaph.
There are storm clouds brewing in Westminster, and when the air finally clears, Europe and Scotland may well be in very different places, while a dazed and disorientated Theresa May looks around and wonders where everyone went, and where it all went wrong.