It’s time for May to step down from the moral high ground
NO MODERN prime minister has been more ill-suited to the role than Theresa May. A mediocre politician devoid of charisma, credibility and conviction, she presided over a disastrously paralysed Government. Almost as soon as she entered Downing Street, the authority began to drain away.After less than three years in office, she departed in a flood of tears, leaving behind a miserable legacy of broken promises and chronic misjudgments.
That is what makes her extraordinary attack on Boris Johnson so unjustified. In a newspaper article to mark the inauguration of President Biden yesterday, May denounced her successor for abandoning Britain’s “position of moral leadership” in the world.
She reserved particular venom for his recent cut in the foreign aid budget and his threat to overturn the Northern Irish protocol in the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, negotiated last October. Both these decisions, she claimed, had damaged us “in the eyes of the world”. Resorting to the kind of finger-wagging sanctimony that has long been her trademark, she declared that “we must live up to our values”.
THE whole outburst stank of petty vindictiveness and jealousy. The real failure is hers, not his. On so many fronts, he has succeeded triumphantly where she stumbled so badly. While she was a serial loser, he has proven a winner, nowhere more graphically than in his leadership of their party.
Having taken over from her in July 2018, he immediately galvanised the Tories, then led them to a resounding victory in the December General Election.
In contrast, May brought only disappointment during her illstarred reign. Through her catastrophic mismanagement of the 2017 General Election, when she ran away from debates, botched the Conservative manifesto and mindlessly repeated hollow slogans, she almost handed over the governance of the country to the quasi-Marxist revolutionary Jeremy Corbyn.
Her dismal performance amounted to a betrayal of the Conservative cause, reflected in the loss of both her Commons majority and able MPs.
It was the same story with Brexit. Against all expectations, Johnson not only secured the Withdrawal Agreement and the trade deal but also heroically fulfilled his pledge to achieve real independence. May’s whole approach to Brexit was dominated by setback and stalemate. As she limped from one crisis to another the prize of British freedom seemed in real danger.
Yesterday she bleated that compromise must not be seen as “a dirty word”. Yet her version of compromise with the EU amounted to surrender.
Given her sorry record, she is in no position to lecture her successor. Indeed, her whole stance reeks of hypocrisy. She talks about the dangers of isolation, yet she was hopeless at international diplomacy and Johnson’s Government has already reached more than 60 post-Brexit trade deals. Just as empty is her moan about foreign aid, too much of which fuels dependency, waste and corruption rather than providing genuine assistance.
Its arbitrary size is a monument to political vanity, but that kind of virtue-signalling has always been a feature of May’s career. She regularly boasted of her commitment to fighting modern slavery in Britain, yet it is partly a result of our lax border controls, which she did nothing to tighten.
IN ANOTHER spasm of liberal piety, as home secretary she cracked down on the ability of the police to stopand-search suspects, with the predictable consequence that street crime exploded. And she swallowed the transgender ideology as she pushed for selfidentification to be made legal, even though the dogma represents an attack on women’s rights, biological science and the innocence of childhood.
Like an inadequate headmistress, May tried to use piety to make up for her lack of command. But she has no right to squat on the moral high ground. Her own style of government was highly toxic, characterised by her reluctance to consult and her graceless treatment of colleagues. “She never discussed things. She was permanently tone deaf,” recalls one Tory MP.
When she sacked George Osborne as chancellor, she told him pompously to “get to know your party”.
Ex-prime ministers should be extremely wary of denouncing their successors. Sadly, May seems to be following the ugly example of Sir Edward Heath, whose contempt for Mrs Thatcher inspired his nickname of “the Incredible Sulk”. Given he was almost as useless a prime minister as May, his pomposity was just as unmerited.
‘Given her record, May is in no position to lecture her successor’