Mrs May is a decent person. Probably too decent to be PM

All that talking tough. All that banging on about her strong leadership. All that Thatcherstyle finger-jabbing at PMQS. It was an act. The truth, now she bashfully allows us to glimpse it, is the opposite. Our Prime Minister is agonisingly shy.

Yesterday, to Emma Barnett on Radio 5 Live, Theresa May gave her first interview about how she felt on election night. She confessed, after some gentle coaxing, that she’d cried. But that wasn’t the most revealing admission.

“To be honest with you, I didn’t actually watch the exit poll,” she said.

“My husband watched it for me, and came and told me.” Then, a moment later: “There are times when I get him to read a newspaper article for me, and tell me what it says, rather than read it directly.” Those few words tell us such a lot. She said she didn’t watch the exit poll because “I have a bit of a superstition about things like that”, but come on. The reason she didn’t watch it, quite nakedly, is that she was frightened. Frightened of failure, humiliation, rejection.

Her second admission confirms it. Getting her husband to read articles for her. She didn’t give a reason, but it was pretty obvious. Again, she’s frightened. Frightened of what the article might say about her.

Frightened of criticism, mockery, and again, rejection.

Well, if you’re reading this one, Mr May, tell her it isn’t critical, or mocking. It’s sympathetic. Listening to Mrs May, as she deviated further than she ever has from an aide’s script, I felt for her. It made me like her more, as a person. It made me see her as a decent, well-meaning, sensitive human being.

It also, though, made me think she really, really isn’t cut out to be Prime Minister. The hardest, most thankless job in the country is being performed by someone so vulnerable, so fragile , so painfully introverted, that she daren’t even read about herself in a newspaper. This interview can’t have been easy for her. We could hear her awkwardness.

On the second time of asking, she conceded that she’d shed “a little tear”. As she spoke, she sounded, to me, as if she was smiling: smiling apologetically, in the way shy people do when trying to downplay their hurt. Crying? Oh, you know, it was nothing, just a moment of silliness, don’t know what came over me really…

Also telling was her hasty switch to the second person. “You’re a human being… You’ve been through that experience… [But] you’ve got a responsibility…” Pamela Stephenson, the clinical psychologist, has observed that people uncomfortable talking about emotion often switch from “I” to “You”. It makes them feel less exposed, and distances them from their pain.

Mrs May said she intends to stay on as PM. I wonder if it might be kinder not to let her.