Why Mrs May will be remembered as the leader this country needed
IT’S been another trying week for Theresa May, during which her leadership has again been challenged. It opened with Boris Johnson trying to upstage her by demanding more money for the NHS and ended with an indifferent performance at the gathering of the world’s richest and most powerful at Davos.
In between these bookends, Mrs May has had to endure a series of withering articles about why she is ‘appalling’ and must go.
Several writers drew inspiration from The Darkest Hour, the new film about Churchill. Here, they say, was a real leader.
Churchill, standing up for Britain in 1940 in its hour of greatest need, is an irresistible comparison to many: defeating his critics, outwitting his Cabinet and winning over the nation with his magnificent speeches.
In the eyes of her critics, Theresa May looks pathetic in comparison. Indecisive, bumbling and unable to prevail against her Cabinet colleagues, for whom she is a mere pawn.
The most vitriolic of her critics draw on the words of Churchill’s contemporary Leo Amery, who told Neville Chamberlain, Churchill’s predecessor: ‘In the name of God, go!’
Not for the first time in recent years, those calling for Mrs May to go and actively working to bring it about are on the wrong side of history.
I cut my political teeth as a biographer writing about John Major. For five years, from 1992 until his eventual defeat in 1997, he endured a prolonged and withering campaign of negativity from the press and Conservative MPs.
Yet with hindsight we look back upon his government as rather an effective one, with steady economic growth, important domestic reforms and peace abroad. So, too, I believe, will the government of Theresa May be judged. She may yet remain in office until the autumn of 2019. If so, she will have been responsible for overseeing Britain’s departure from the EU in a way that secures the best chance of this country thriving economically and politically in the future, avoiding the more extreme options of the hotheads on both sides.
No other leader in Britain will be able to secure this pragmatic
departure, which she will pull off in her own inimitable, unconventional and unhistrionic style. A more polarised figure might be able to secure a more definitive exit, but doing so will excite enduring bitterness among the Remain side, and lead to years of rancour.
She alone might be able to cauterise this most divisive of issues which dates back 50 years to the first attempts in the 1960s for Britain to enter the European Union. If Mrs May does indeed depart in October 2019, her period in office will have lasted almost exactly the same time – three and a half years – as the Prime Minister who took us into Europe, Ted Heath. Her premiership will be judged by historians, if not by contemporaries, to have been far more successful.
The job of Prime Minister has become a cruel and unforgiving one. Look at the past three incumbents – David Cameron, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. All are held up for public ire almost as enemies of the people. Until the expectation of what can be achieved is balanced by the reality, we may never again see a figure as popular as Churchill.
EVEN he, let us remember, was turfed out ignominiously by the electorate in the General Election in July 1945. A much better comparison for May as Prime Minister is not Churchill, but a figure in another major war film about to hit our screens. Journey’s End is set in the First World War, and is already being described as ‘the greatest film ever to be made about that earlier war’.
The film’s focus is on Captain Stanhope, who endures extraordinary punishment as he leads his team through the most difficult of times.
His style is endlessly criticised, yet he endures his three-year leadership with dignity and humanity, never losing his values or his honour. This is Theresa May as Prime Minister. She is not intellectually brilliant or a great orator. Her style of leadership is to let others in her team shine, and to create the conditions in which they can bring out their best.
Like Capt Stanhope, the hero of Journey’s End, she takes the constant punishment and humiliation, knowing that it is her duty to prevail, however adverse and hateful the conditions around her.
The nation trusts and respects her more than many at the centre.
I think this dignified, awkward woman could yet emerge from these angry times as the leader this country needed.