It’s an art you must quickly learn, Mrs May
Like playing backgammon, being able to execute an adequate foxtrot with a tipsy uncle at a wedding, and knowing how to fix a dry martini, small talk is one of those essential life skills that no one ever bothers to teach you. But a failure to master these grace notes of social intercourse is to invite instant ostracism: at best, you will be considered uncouth; at worst, arrogant, unfeeling and an object of righteous opprobrium.
A former speech writer to Theresa May has described his awkward first encounter with the then Home Secretary. Summoned to lunch with her, he drew up a chair and “immediately discovered May had no small talk whatsoever. She was perfectly comfortable with silence, which I found extremely disorientating.”
There are plenty of jobs in which being perfectly comfortable with silence is a positive asset. With obvious media-friendly exceptions, gardeners, jockeys and writers are often rather taciturn types: plants, horses and blank pages are rarely disorientated by silence. Also on the list of suitable careers for the tongue-tied: lighthouse keeper, shepherd, member of an enclosed religious order, and the sort of person who devotes a lifetime to deciphering Sumerian shopping lists from weeny fragments of ancient clay tablet.
Politician, not so much. A fluent mastery of phatic communication has become a core skill for our legislators, not least because sometime between the dawn of democracy and now, a reluctance to fill a silence with an instant dollop of bland chat has become synonymous with rudeness.
Mrs May is often described as “shy”, and her Cordelia-like inability to heave her heart into her mouth has cost her very dearly. But shyness takes many forms. For some, the idea of having to address a large group of people is enough to bring on a conniption. Others, who feel no dread at the prospect of giving a presentation or entertaining a hall full of paying punters, are paralysed by the simple task of exchanging niceties with a stranger, or even an acquaintance.
For those of us in the second group, it doesn’t help that the unafflicted majority regards a jolly get-together as something to look forward to, rather than a season in hell. Over the course of my adult life I have been to hundreds of parties, and spent many of them lurking behind a pot plant, watching with stupefaction as groups of people chat animatedly, then disperse as though at some unseen signal, and effortlessly reform themselves into different groups. What do they find to say? And how do they recognise the exact moment to move on? It remains a mystery.
Occasionally at these gatherings I run into some other outcast, equally shy, and we lurk together in rueful solidarity. This stratagem hit the rocks at a particularly grand literary party when our hostess flushed us out from behind the floral decorations with an imperious cry of “Don’t talk to each other, darlings. Talk to men!”
I am fond of talking to men. And women. But just as I’d rather go hungry than eat fast food, I prefer silence to a mouthful of conversational Pot Noodles. Still, someone should surely have warned Mrs May that the reconstituted dried vegetables of social discourse are the staple diet of prime ministers.