BREXIT BOADICEA
A ‘quiet’ revolutionary? No, the PM is a merciless opportunist cudgeling her opponents like a ...
IT WAS an elegant but brutal mugging by Theresa May who has taken the mantle of Brexit and wielded it as a bloody instrument to cudgel her opponents in the most radical realignment of Conservatism by a Tory leader for 100 years.
What made her conference speech all the more extraordinary is that it was delivered by an unelected Prime Minister and an opponent of Brexit who has now dressed herself up in the Union Jack as its standard bearer.
Theresa May stands like a Brexit Boadicea, breathing fiery words against fat cats, gas rip-offs, and her biggest bugbear – the privileged and the few – as she repositions herself as the Tory leader who is the tribune of the working classes. It is the most opportunistic manoeuvre by a woman who has quietly risen from a suburban rectory without trace. Farewell to the posh chumocracy and all elites. Instead, we have the beginning of a fight for low-paid workers – in some ways a complete rewiring of how the Conservative Party has been seen for many years.
HER speech was merciless and well-aimed. Her jibe at Boris being unable to keep on message was both funny and deadly. Don’t mess with me, was her message. She sees EU border control as the red line she will not cross, sanctioning one of the most inflammatory speeches on immigration by her Home Secretary since Enoch Powell’s bathed us in his Rivers of Blood speech.
May effectively writes off the single market. Not that this will be easy or necessarily happen, as staying in the single market has the support of her Chancellor and many other soft Brexiteers.
She will need every fibre of her body to steam ahead with her hard Brexit aims, as her own party is showing inevitable tensions over how it wants to see Brexit unwind our relationship with Europe. Many don’t want a hard Brexit. Many don’t want Brexit at all. Many more wish they had never voted Brexit. The plunge in the pound to the lowest rate for 31 years was an ominous warning.
Like Queen Elizabeth, the May Queen is the principal source of security we have in Britain today. Madness seems to be everywhere else. Labour is tearing itself to shreds, Ukip is knocking the stuffing out of itself, the Lib Dems have disappeared into a taxi, the Scottish National Party are only waiting for the polls to shift before calling for a new referendum, while Britain’s core foreign policy, the 40-year relationship with the EU, is about to end.
May has injected stability into the most unstable political position in Britain since the 1970s. But who exactly is she and what does she believe in? We thought she was going to be solid and predictable, just a little dull perhaps, but, wham-bam, since she has become Prime Minister she has been socking it to everyone left, right and centre.
May is much easier to understand than people think. She is not the Iron Lady, like Thatcher. But neither is she the Tin Lady, though she is what she says on the tin. She is hard to read because she has no Conservative lineage. She dislikes talking about her political mentors, or any thinkers who have influenced her. The truth is that her politics have been informed not by Conservative thinkers or philosophers of any hue, but by life.
As with Thatcher, it is the background, stupid, that forged her. She is the diligent, state schooleducated daughter of the local vicar, whose hard work got her into Oxford, and whose parents’ early deaths in 1981 and 1982 made her self-reliant. From them she imbibed service to others and Christianity, the tenets which shape her core. The emotional and intellectual rock of her life is the man she met at Oxford, Philip May, whom she married in 1980. Their relationship absorbs much of her emotional and intellectual life and has made her even more self-contained.
So what is Mayism? Simple. Her stall has three pillars. Moving the Conservative Party into the centre-ground, and away from privilege to make it the party of opportunity for all. Winning the next General Election and securing her own mandate. And achieving a soft landing for Britain post-Brexit.
The seminal speech of her life was delivered outside No10 on July 13, the day she became Prime Minister, in which she spoke about ‘burning injustice’ in British society and her desire to create a union ‘between all of our citizens’. She also promised to be an advocate for the ‘ordinary working-class family’ and not for the affluent in the UK. ‘The Government I lead will be driven not by the interests of the privileged few but by yours. We will do everything we can to give you more control over your lives… When we take the big calls, we’ll think not of the powerful, but you. When we pass new laws, we’ll listen not to the mighty, but to you. When it comes to taxes, we’ll prioritise not the wealthy but you.’
Mayism is less of a break with Cameroonism than we think – even her team admit there is as much continuity as change. But she believes that his Government personified the chasm that had been growing between the public and politicians, which the EU referendum so powerfully illustrated. She believes that far too many people have lost control over what matters in their lives, and crave security – not just from traditional Tory concerns of crime and terrorism, but also from poor-qual- ity health care, unsatisfactory schools, and worries caused by excessive immigration.
May is less squeamish than any Tory leader since Ted Heath about saying that government is important. She sees it as an enabler, vital in redressing market imperfections and exploitative behaviour, whether by individuals such as Philip Green or energy firms ripping off consumers.
Her speech had been a long time in the making. A lifetime, in fact, bottled up inside her. She wanted to make a powerful statement defining who she was at the start of her premiership. Few Prime Ministers have come in with a clear manifesto; even Thatcher took several years to define her mission.
SHE’S determined to be her own woman in No10. She knows that parading herself in public is not her forte, and she will see her main job as working in the building, taking decisions, and not being constantly in front of the cameras like her predecessors.
Like many incoming Prime Ministers, she wants to be more collegiate, and to use Cabinet and its committees more. Her No10 has been flooded by an influx of women, though she remains guided principally by her two most trusted advisers, now joint Chiefs of Staff, the savvy Fiona Hill and the intellectual and creative policy thinker Nick Timothy. Together with husband Philip, they form the three-horsed Troika, driving her into the blizzards ahead.
So there we have her. She faces formidable challenges. Many in her party are confused by her assault on privilege. Her grammar school initiative has united the education establishment against her, no mean feat. Brexit will be even tougher than she thinks. Many write off her chances. The description given to Harold Macmillan after he became Conservative Prime Minister all but 60 years ago was ‘Supermac’. But he lost his moniker after he failed to cement his agenda and take Britain into Europe.
If May succeeds in taking us out, and achieves her agenda, she will earn herself the title in history of ‘Supermay’.
It’s farewell to the posh chumocracy and all elites