Less robotic Iron Lady 2.0, more an anxious introvert
Have we got Theresa May wrong? I’m beginning to think we have. We mock her as mechanical, stiff, a script-reciting automaton. When my friend John Crace, a fellow political sketch writer, christened her The Maybot, the nickname instantly stuck. It isn’t just opponents who call her The Maybot, either. Apparently, junior Tory campaign staff use it too.
I wonder, though. Sure, Mrs May can seem robotic when answering questions. Funnily enough, a journalist from Channel 4 recently asked her how she feels about being called a robot. Her reply: “I think what’s important is that we get on with the job and getting on with the job is about delivering for people.”
Honestly, Prime Minister. I’m trying to argue you aren’t a robot. You’re really not helping me.
All the same, though, I’m going to do it. Because it isn’t true. Theresa May isn’t a robot. She isn’t cold or heartless or unfeeling.
She’s just an introvert. And for an introvert, I’m afraid, being Prime Minister – under the ceaseless taunting glare of the cameras – may well be the most ill-advised career choice in the world. In yesterday’s paper I wrote about the revealing interview Mrs May gave to Emma Barnett on Radio 5 Live. The Prime Minister confessed that she couldn’t bear to watch the exit poll announcement on election night, so she got her husband Philip to watch it, and then come and break the news to her gently. The same with newspaper articles about her: she daren’t read them, so she gets Philip to do it, and then give her the gist.
These are not the actions of an Iron Lady 2.0. They’re the actions of someone who, beneath it all, is actually rather anxious, and shy.
It’s not the only evidence of Mrs May’s secret shyness. Look at her body language, particularly at international summits. See her hovering alone on the periphery, unsure what to do with her hands, desperately scanning the room for a friendly face – exactly like a shy person at a party. Meanwhile, other leaders swagger in and slap each other on the back, swapping banter and barking with laughter. Blaring extroverts, every last one of them. Angela Merkel, admittedly, is no back-slapper or banter-swapper, but she radiates the extrovert’s impregnable selfassurance. Unlike Mrs May. Think back to the election campaign. So many of the Prime Minister’s speeches were to audiences comprised solely of her own candidates, or her own activists. While Jeremy Corbyn was out greeting strangers by the tens of thousands, Mrs May seemed to be hiding from almost anyone she didn’t already know.
Tory critics have often complained that Mrs May trusts no one outside a tiny closed circle of allies. The critics read this as the behaviour of an autocrat. But equally it’s the behaviour of an introvert. Introverts rely heavily on a small number of close, long-standing friends – and shut everyone else out.
And that, I suspect, is the truth about Mrs May. That’s the real reason she’s always been so untalkative at lunches with journalists, and gets called “unclubbable”, and “doesn’t do gossip”. That’s the real reason she painstakingly memorises soundbites ahead of daunting interviews and press conferences. That’s the real reason she was all at sea when the media and the public demanded she be seen at Grenfell Tower, hugging survivors and emoting for TV.
She’s not a robot. She’s just a shy person, pretending to be a confident person. It’s a horribly difficult trick – and she’s struggling to pull it off.
For a serious analysis of what’s happening in the Labour Party, we don’t need journalists. We need psychologists.
It’s fascinating: the intensity with which disciples of Jeremy Corbyn will defend his every utterance, even over Brexit.
Legions of young Remainers appear to have convinced themselves that their hero has some secret plan to save them from Brexit – even though he’s been a Eurosceptic for 40 years, demanded Article 50 be triggered the day after the referendum, has decided their beloved free movement of people must end, and has sacked front-bench colleagues for voting to stay in the single market. I’m honestly not sure there’s anything Mr Corbyn could say that would break the spell. He could pledge to abolish the NHS, and a good 80 per cent of his disciples would persuade themselves they agreed. “Brilliant strategic move.” “Totally wrong-footed the Tories.” “He’s playing 4D chess.”
“4D? At least five. Maybe six.” “Lol at the centrists. They just don’t get it.”
“If they bothered to look at it, they’d see his position on abolishing the NHS is actually very nuanced.”
“This isn’t Tory austerity. It’s socialist austerity. An austerity of hope. An austerity for the people.”
“Anyway, the NHS was actually invented by the Tories as a plot to weaken the proletariat by making them addicted to prescription drugs. I read it on Skwawkbox.”
“Oh, the NHS is totally Tory. Almost as Tory as the BBC.”
“So glad he’s abolishing that too.”
Something wonderful is about to happen. In London this autumn, they’re opening a nursing home that doubles as a nursery.
There are already places like this in the US and Japan. Now they’re coming here. Elderly people and little children, playing together every day. What a lovely idea. It suits everyone. For the elderly, scores of tiny joyful visitors. For the children, a bonus army of their favourite people in the world: grannies and granddads.
My three-year-old son goes to nursery. He likes it well enough, but if it were full of old people, endlessly indulging him in the way old people are programmed by nature to do, I’m not sure he’d ever want to come home.