A leader who only lacked avocation in adversity
Former premiers all had their coping mechanisms, from Brown and poetry to Douglas-home’s flower-arranging
Ihave been in the privileged position of having met every British prime minister since Anthony Eden (1955-57), and I have seen – often at first-hand – the various ways in which each has faced adversity, and how they have sought comfort in times of crisis.
So, how has Mrs May coped? How is she coping now, during her darkest hour?
I happened to have lunch with the Prime Minister on Tuesday this week. She had just come from a torrid Cabinet meeting and was off to make the speech at Charing Cross that would trigger her downfall – but for the hour I was with her you would not have known that anything was amiss
at all. She appeared totally relaxed; friendly, chatty, not in the least distracted. It was extraordinary, given the circumstances.
I first encountered Mrs May in 1992, when we both stood for parliament for the first time. I liked her then. I like her now. Waiting for her arrival, on Tuesday, I asked another of our lunch guests (a female parliamentary colleague of the PM’S) how long they had been friends. “We aren’t friends,” she said, tartly. “She doesn’t have friends. I’m not sure she’s human. Sometimes I think she’s an alien. Or a Russian spy.”
She is neither, of course, but she is an only child, married to an only child, and it seems that she and her husband confide in one another and possibly no one else. Apart from God. The Mays go to church every Sunday, not simply out of habit or as a weekly photo opportunity, but because their faith matters. In her darkest moments, I suspect Mrs May has found consolation in prayer.
By surviving as prime minister until next week, she has at least achieved one of her goals: Mrs May’s term in office will have lasted longer than that of Gordon Brown (2007-10), another three-year premier whose time in the job is generally characterised as a failure. How did Brown cope when the going got tough?
In some bleak moments, he would do what Mrs May never does: have a temper tantrum and throw his papers on the floor. But in his darkest hours, on his own, Brown would chew his fingernails to the quick – and (wait for it) read poetry. People find this hard to believe, but I was once invited to an evening of poetry in Downing Street, hosted by Brown, at which he read aloud Burns and Tennyson and spoke movingly about the consoling and restorative power of verse.
In 1995, when I was an MP, I found myself in the Members’ Dining Room at the House of Commons sitting next to John Major (1990-97), on what might have been his last night as prime minister. He had put himself up for re-election as Conservative leader and the votes were not yet in. He looked bleak, pasty-faced and weary.
“I think it’s going pretty well,” I said, trying to cheer him up.
“Do you?” He shook his head. “I just don’t know. The Sun, The Times, The
Telegraph, they’re all saying I should go. Even the Daily Mail is against me.”
Silence fell. I tried to make conversation. He was monosyllabic. I thought, “Poor sod, this could be his last night as prime minister and he’s spending it with me, like this!’”
And then, in came Peter Brooke, former Northern Ireland secretary, and sat down beside me. He looked at the PM and said he had just finished reading an article about a former Surrey cricketer. Major brightened at once.
He continued, describing some particularly memorable match from the glorious summer of 1937, and within a minute the pall that had engulfed the table lifted, as Peter and the PM talked Thirties cricket in animated, fascinated, happy detail. Famously, on the day he lost the election, John Major went off to watch the cricket.
In adversity, the prime ministers who have a hinterland are blessed. I knew Ted Heath (1970-74) quite well and, while he was consumed by his contempt for Margaret Thatcher, who succeeded him as Conservative leader, he was both distracted and consoled by the passions that absorbed him: sailing yachts and conducting orchestras.
Heath also had something that, I think, Mrs May lacks: a network of international statesmen who offered him the hand of friendship when he felt his own party had betrayed him. He was particularly proud to call himself a friend of Fidel Castro. If ever you went to his beautiful house near Salisbury Cathedral, Ted would show off the orchids in his garden. “Fidel sent me those,” he’d say, with pride. After dinner, he would offer you a cigar: “Fidel gave them to me for Christmas.”
In her resignation speech, Mrs May pointed out that she is “the second female prime minister, but certainly not the last”.
In office, her predecessor Margaret Thatcher (1979-90) seemed to thrive on stress. Out of office, she was lost. When she left Downing Street for the final time there were certainly tears in her eyes, too.
Towards the end of her 11 years at No10, colleagues found her increasingly impatient and hectoring, but she coped with the difficult times by immersing herself in paperwork and fussing (in a good way) around family and friends – making the sandwiches, brewing the tea, pouring the drinks, picking the stray thread off your jacket. To the end, she was a mother-hen. My wife and I saw her quite often during her retirement and realised that, without politics, she had no real interests or hobbies to fall back on. And, without Denis, she had nothing at all.
I recall meeting up with Lady Thatcher in South Africa, where she had gone to holiday with her son, Mark. She was being driven around looking for things to do and people to meet. There were no members of the South African government available that day, so she was delighted to see me, not because it was me, but because we had both been MPS and she could talk politics. That’s all she wanted to do.
We know that her hero, Winston Churchill (1940-45; 1951-55), coped with his “black dog” days and the nation’s darkest hours by drinking a good deal, painting, and brick laying. He also spent a lot of time in bed.
“I am a great believer in bed,” said Henry Campbell-bannerman, whose term as prime minister (1905-08) was even briefer than Mrs May’s.
At moments of crisis, he retreated between the sheets. Keeping “constantly horizontal”, he claimed, ensured that “the heart and everything else go slower … It is how I survive”.
His predecessor at the helm, Arthur
Balfour (another three-year man, 1902-05), turned to reading cowboy stories and playing games of patience.
For hours on end, he would sit alone at a card table at No10. Patience, he maintained, had got him through the worst moments of the Boer War.
When, as a schoolboy, I interviewed Sir Alec Douglas-home (who barely managed a year in office, 1963-64), he told me that in his “darkest moments” he always turned to flower-arranging. “There is nothing more soothing,” he said. “Or satisfying, come to that.”
While Harold Wilson (1964-70; 1974-76), told me that he coped with stress by sucking on his pipe, drinking a tumbler of whisky and singing his favourite bits of Gilbert and Sullivan. (He knew a lot by heart).
I once asked Harold Macmillan (1957-63) if it was true that, as prime minister, he found time to read the novels of Anthony Trollope.
“Absolutely,” he said, “there’s no crisis that can’t be helped by an hour or two of calm spent reading Trollope”.
The Last Chronicle of Barset was his favourite.
“And what do you read when there isn’t a crisis?” I countered.
“Jane Austen,” he said, before adding, with a soft chuckle, “but, of course, there is always a crisis”.
I wish Mrs May all the best in coping with hers.
Gyles Brandreth is a former Conservative MP and the author of ‘Breaking the Code: Westminster Diaries’
‘Within a minute the pall that had engulfed the table lifted, as Peter Brooke and John Major talked Thirties cricket in animated, happy detail’
‘Harold Wilson told me that he coped with stress by sucking on his pipe, drinking whisky and singing his favourite bits of Gilbert and Sullivan’