A shred of sympathy but – thankfully – this tragedy is over
Always the trouper, she fought to stave off her tears... but lost
It hurt to watch. You could see in her face the battle she was fighting. Fighting to keep her composure. Fighting to maintain her dignity. Fighting to show that, despite it all, she was going out with her head held high. Sadly, it was yet another battle
that Theresa May just couldn’t win. For six minutes – almost the whole of her speech – she’d managed to stand firm. She’d sounded calm. Steady. In the circumstances, heroic.
But then she glanced down at the closing lines of her script.
“I will shortly leave the job,” read Mrs May, “that it has been the honour of my life to hold.”
Then she gulped. Audibly gulped. Valiantly, she tried to haul herself back on course. “The second female prime minister,” she said, lifting her chin defiantly. Proudly. But there was no mistaking it. The voice was starting to crack. It was impossible not to feel for her. Impossible not to root for her. To will her to stay strong, and hold it together, as she was clearly battling so hard to do.
“I do so with no ill will, but with enormous and enduring gratitude,” she said, rallying gamely, “to have had the opportunity to serve...” – but it was no good. She could hold out no longer. The battle was lost. Her resistance collapsed. Her features crumpled – “… the country I love,” she croaked. And, sobbing, her shoulders shaking, the Prime Minister turned on her heels, and retreated miserably into the darkness of No10.
Normally, at the end of a statement in Downing Street, reporters yell out questions. The questions are always ignored, but the reporters yell them out anyway.
Not this time. Everyone stood silent. No one had a word to say.
The race to succeed Mrs May had begun even before she’d opened her mouth.
I wonder, though. Surely her
Has she really gone? Are we quite sure she’s gone? Can someone please check behind the sofa, just in case? Theresa May was harder to get out than chewing gum. The Prime Minister’s turbulent final weeks in office were marked by obduracy, duplicity, secrecy, a bunker mentality and an unwillingness to listen, all hallmarks of her leadership style. She had infuriated absolutely everyone, even Andrea Leadsom, a staunch Brexiteer who had remained loyal, trusting and good-natured as a golden retriever throughout.
And yet, yesterday morning, as she stood outside No10 concluding her words of resignation – in both senses – you had to feel for Mrs May. This intensely private woman finally broke down. As she spoke of the “enormous and enduring gratitude” that “I have had the opportunity to serve the country I love”, her face crumpled into a gash of grief and she turned swiftly on her heel to hide her anguish.
At such painful moments of public drama, common humanity kicks in.
Suddenly, this reviled and remote figure, who became a straw doll to vent our frustration on, is restored to the human being she actually is. A vicar’s daughter (“I promise that I shall do my best, to do my duty to God, to serve the Queen and help other people” was the Brownie-guide motto and Theresa’s, too) who dedicated herself to public service was now enduring the humiliation of being untimely ripped from “the job I love”.
Even her sternest critics will have felt a flicker of sympathy as the glorious May sunshine appeared to mock May’s sadness. Her devoted husband, Philip, stood nearby with a pallbearer’s pallor. (What long dark nights of the soul that beleaguered couple must have had.) Familiar phrases suggested his wife was thinking back to that very first speech at the Downing Street podium, in July 2016, when our elated new PM, pretty with the flush of power, outlined a one-nation vision “to build a country that works for everyone”.
Were we rather pleased with her then? You might never love Theresa May, but she wasn’t slick or glib as Tony Blair or David Cameron could be.
Unlike them, she was incapable of faking emotion. We mistook that for old-fashioned decency rather than a weird hollowness where a personality should have been. She promised that “Brexit means Brexit” which we thought meant, well, Brexit, funnily enough. Yesterday, she said, with a flash of defiance, that she was the
country’s second woman prime minister “but not the last”, a neat way of bracketing herself with the first, Margaret Thatcher, who was also (she hardly need add) done in by the chaps.
Sorry, but there is no comparison. Maggie’s red-eyed expulsion was the final act of a Greek tragedy. In order for there to be a tragedy, you first need a heroine (or hero) of real stature. Mrs Thatcher left office after three general election victories having reinvented a broken country. Mrs May leaves after barely three years (and one general election debacle) with a country broken by division, a rogue Parliament and a Tory Party on the brink.
The charitable view is that she faced an impossible task trying to deliver Brexit and showed great resilience as she did battle with a Parliament heavily weighted in favour of Remain. History, I suspect, will deliver a far less generous verdict. She had one job. A job for which she was almost perfectly unsuited. Where vision and charm were required, she brought caution and leaden, prefabricated sound bites. She parroted them – “Strong and stable”, “No deal is better than a bad deal” – long after they became the subject of national mockery. Instead of passionate conviction, she had statement necklaces.
That instinctive sympathy we felt yesterday for someone so ill-equipped for a historic role was soon supplanted, for me at least, by anger and disbelief. Why had the Conservative Party not acted sooner to put her – and us – out of our misery?
Who doesn’t shudder at the memory of that suicide-vest of a 2017 manifesto, with something in it to offend everyone, even elderly Conservatives whose homes it insanely threatened to confiscate? She should have gone then, after she squandered a 20-point lead over the loony-left Corbyn.
She should have gone after that excruciating, Strepsil-haunted speech at the Party conference when even the letters on the screen behind her dropped off in disbelief.
She should have gone when she failed to strike a compassionate note with the survivors of Grenfell Tower.
As for that moment when the Prime Minister of the UK entered another Party conference to Abba, dancing like a stork struck by lightning… And still they didn’t demand her resignation.
You know the worst thing? We are now back exactly where we were in June 2016: Brexit still to be delivered, a leadership contest with Boris the favourite (stabbed in the back by Michael Gove) when, for want of any better option, came our Accidental Prime Minister. Three wasted years.
Yes, there will be sympathy for Mrs May. A decent, dedicated woman who was appallingly out of her depth, but lacked the capacity to know it. Mainly, though, what we feel today is huge sense of relief. She’s gone at last.
Now it’s time to find a leader who can lead.