As the sharks circle, will the PM sink or swim?

Criticism leaves May in choppy conference waters

EIGHTY-FOUR days ago, Theresa May took to the stage in Birmingham to make her first speech in the final leg of the Conservative leadership campaign.

It would be the only one she would need to give, her rival Andrea Leadsom dramatically withdrawing from the contest just hours later.

In quickfire fashion, the long-standing Home Secretary was declared Tory leader and Prime Minister.

On Wednesday, as fate would have it, Mrs May will grace the ballroom in Birmingham once again, an inadvertently fitting location for this year’s Conservative party conference.

The last time around, she outlined her vision for “a country that works not for a privileged few but for everyone”.

It was a recurring theme in that address and has since been recycled numerous times, like her increasingly tired “Brexit means Brexit” motto.

But, three months later, her plans to end the ban on the creation of new grammar schools have cast doubt on her promise of a fairer society and, frustratingly, no one is any clearer as to what Brexit does in fact mean.

The time for slogans is well and truly over.

Both the party and country expect action, or at least something concrete, and surely now is the moment to supply it?

Many suspected Mrs May had planned for her contentious selective schooling policy to be her big conference reveal. With that already leaked, however, she will have to come up with something else.

Confirming when she intends to trigger Article 50 would be a good start.

The question has dominated Mrs May’s premiership, with attacks from all sides.

Critics have included impatient Brexiteers as well as Remainers within her own party, opposition MPs and the business community.

Significantly, in the last few days she has become the target of criticism from former Tory chancellor Ken Clarke.

Brutally claiming nobody in the Government had a plan for getting Britain out of the EU, he branded the May administration one “with no policies”.

The Prime Minister has so far been belligerent in declaring she will not take decisions until she is ready.

But this cannot go on ad infinitum and the longer she holds out the more pressure she will be under.

Over and above that, the conference also presents a big personal test for Mrs May, who has seemed uncharacteristically nervous since her coronation as Tory leader.

Most notably, her most recent performance at PMQs, a surprise win for Jeremy Corbyn, was shaky at best.

There was also her apparent wobble over the plans for a new nuclear power station at Hinkley in Somerset.

Moreover, last week she came under fire once again over the beleaguered inquiry into child sex abuse.

And let’s not forget Mrs May has no mandate from the country.

Speculation about whether she will call a general election before 2020 keeps rearing its ugly head.

Of course, a further poll would hardly be good for the UK at this point, at least before a Brexit deal is hammered out.

But it is nevertheless another ingredient in Mrs May’s ever-expanding cauldron of woes.

So more than anything else in Birmingham – incidentally, a city with more miles of canals than Venice – she will be eager to assert her authority, to project an image of confidence.

She needs to look and sound like a Prime Minister.

Because if she can emerge queen of the waterways, she will – in one fell swoop – rally her divided troops, help reassure the nation and show other EU leaders she means business. Can she do it? A look-back at Teflon Theresa’s tenure as home secretary reveals she’s undoubtedly a survivor.

Notoriously one of the hardest jobs in politics, she stuck it out for six years, despite several controversies and failing to bring net migration down to the tens of thousands.

Her remarkable resilience was also manifest in her ultimately successful battle to secure Abu Qatada’s deportation.

Mrs May must dig deep and find that same spirit now.