May’s most telling gift is for saying too little
Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, accuses her fellow Cabinet member Boris Johnson of being a “back-seat driver”. It is Mrs May, not Boris, who is at the wheel of the Brexit negotiations, she reminds us.
True, perhaps; but Mrs May’s style of driving so far has been to treat us, the British public, as if she were the tense mother of children on a long car journey. “Are we nearly there yet?” we cry out, and get either no answer at all or a glare in the driver’s mirror, which quells us for a few miles but eventually makes us feel rebellious. Boris may actually be giving her a bit of help by telling us how frightfully jolly it will be when she finally gets us to our destination.
It is this communicative function which Mrs May seems to dislike more than any other British leader I have seen in action. As a journalist meeting her on a few occasions over the past 20 years, I have always found her pleasant and correct, but so nervously unwilling to explain anything that she is doing that the encounter has seemed pointless.
If she is like this with the people paid to mediate information to the public, what chance is there that she will reach that public? If she doesn’t reach them, how can she expect them to follow her? She might counter that journalists are unreliable and tricky people to deal with. I am not saying she is wrong. But as Enoch Powell (who often suffered at the hands of the media) used to say: “For a politician to complain about the press is like a sailor complaining about the sea.” The trick is to learn to ride the waves.
At the general election of 2015, the average age of the three main party leaders was 46. This week, as Vince Cable, 74, makes his first speech to the Liberal Democrats’ annual conference as their leader, the average is 67. Jeremy Corbyn is 68. Theresa May, at 60, is very much the baby of the triumvirate.
This average is quite dramatically greater than any other in my lifetime – and I am less than a month younger than Mrs May. Does it represent some sort of cultural change? I wonder if the long after-effects of the 2008 crash have something to do with it.
Since the start of the yuppie era, everyone becoming prime minister after his first general election as party leader – John Major, Tony Blair and David Cameron – has been in his 40s. As it has become more obvious that dynamic, clever, youngish men in smart suits have not got the answer to everything, parties and voters have subliminally begun to link advancing years with superior wisdom, as was customary before modern times.
Oddly, the very young seem particularly keen on this, discerning in Mr Corbyn a sagacity which most of their elders have never noticed. Now, the septuagenarian Mr Cable is shamelessly exploiting this mood of gerontophilia, making Mr Corbyn look disappointingly young.
Donald Trump was wrong to jump in and tweetingly imply that the Parsons Green bombing suspect was known to Scotland Yard. Either this was true – and he was thus breaching shared secret intelligence – or it wasn’t, in which case, it was not worth saying.
We now learn that the police did indeed have some contact with the prime suspect. And, as so often with Mr Trump, he was, it seems, in his blundering manner, on to something. We learnt from a minister in the wake of the Manchester bombing in May that roughly 23,000 people have been “subjects of interest” to British counter-terrorist authorities. This was a shockingly higher figure than ever previously admitted. Our ability to watch, contain or refuse entry to these people lags badly behind our knowledge of their existence.
“Loser terrorists must be dealt with in a much tougher manner,” added Mr Trump. If they are indeed to be losers and not winners, he is right. At the weekend, we walked along a path near Bateman’s, Rudyard Kipling’s house in Sussex. After a few hundred yards, we found it blocked by a high wall of temporary wire mesh with notices warning us of an “unsafe building”. Knowing the way well, I guessed this referred to a disused granary which has been crumbling beside the path for a good many years.
We decided to investigate, and squeezed past the wire by swinging over a ditch. The offending building was indeed the old granary. The path is wide at this point, and since the semi-ruin is also surrounded by high wire, the danger to any walker is minimal. Beyond, the path was also blocked, with red tape and metal gates slotted into a portable concrete base. We wriggled through this as well, and continued our walk.
The blockage was ugly and quite unnecessary. I strongly suspect it was erected not so much to help the public as to guard the owners (the National Trust?) against litigation. In his poem “The Way through the Woods”, Kipling invited his readers to follow an old, disused path “of a summer evening late”: “Then you will hear the beat of a horse’s feet, / And the swish of a skirt in the dew… As though they perfectly knew, / The old lost road through the woods.” No such ghosts, and no such poetry, in the age of Health and Safety.
‘The very young discern in Mr Corbyn a sagacity which most of their elders have never noticed’