Alas, Mrs May is no ‘nightingale of the House’
It is, I imagine, a bit like being a boy on the cusp of puberty. You open your mouth and what emerges is something between a squawk and a death rattle. Well, pubescent boys everywhere now have a new poster child: Theresa May.
They ought to have sympathised this week, after all, hearing our Prime Minister croak on and on in a failing voice, through speeches, interventions and questions. Having lost my voice recently due to a cold, I found my own strained vocal chords gripped by a visceral feeling of empathy.
I had spent a frustrating handful of days rasping my way through back-to-back meetings in Berlin. Part of the humiliation is that you never quite know what is going to come out. There is the phlegmy crackling that reduces eloquent words to gargling; the shredded squeaks that drop below audibility; the raw, effortful wheezing; and the wiry, husky drone of a person who should be tucked up in bed but is, for some reason, grilling their companion endlessly about Brexit.
Your dining partner might try to be kind, ordering tea, glancing anxiously at their hands, pretending not to notice, yet they can’t help but recoil. It is only human to be repelled by such an ostentatious display of sickness.
Equally unfairly, we can’t help but judge an argument by the style in which it is made. Mrs May’s ill luck cast a dire sense of doom over all of her efforts. There was
Hear, hear: William Wilberforce, the abolitionist MP, possessed a famously beautiful voice
something cruelly fitting about a Prime Minister who has for so long swerved confrontation, who has misled and strung along and drained words of their meaning by obfuscation and broken promises, being stripped of the physical capacity to press her case in the most important week of her premiership.
Contrast her pitiable squawking with the rich, theatrical booming of the Attorney General. Geoffrey Cox has hardly had a brilliant week, trying to undo his own trashing of the legal notion of “good faith” while retaining his integrity. But his mortification was unfairly reduced by the forceful roaring of his fleshy larynx, the vitality of his thunderous tones comparing favourably with the boss’s sad impairment.
A good voice might be trained, but ultimately it’s a birthright that can’t be bought or earned. Either you have it, like Mr Cox and so many famous political performers of the past, or you don’t. At times, it might even change history. The anti-slave trade campaigner William Wilberforce suffered terrible health, but when he stood up for a three-hour discourse in the Commons, his gorgeous voice made him the “nightingale of the House”.
Mrs May has been a terrible Prime Minister. But I do salute her dogged, vocal marathons. She has literally given voice to the voiceless.