Haunted by a sense of failure, Mrs May was molten with anger and regrets
ANY good general knows that paying respects to the fallen is an essential part of command.
Theresa May appeared to lose sight of that principle for a while yesterday when she made a statement outside 10 Downing Street which quite failed to acknowledge Conservative losses. There wasn’t a sausage about her failure to secure a parliamentary majority.
Within minutes, Tories started to grumble about her lack of tact – she seemed to be ‘tone-deaf’, as the phrase of the moment had it.
Fairly quickly a television reporter was hauled into No 10 and the Prime Minister did cough up her regrets about the unfortunate Tory candidates who had bought it during the early hours of Friday morning.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘for all those candidates and hard- working party workers who weren’t successful, but also particularly sorry for those colleagues who were MPs and ministers who’d contributed so much to our country and who lost their seats and didn’t deserve to lose their seats.’
Putting her head on one side – shades of the actress Selina Cadell, perhaps – she continued: ‘As I reflect on the results I will reflect on what we need to do in the future to take the party forward.’ Was ‘reflect’ an ominous choice of word?
As in, ‘As I reflect on the self-disembowelling knife left on my table by the 1922 Committee’?
The TV interviewer asked Mrs May if she had thought about resigning. In classic T May fashion, her reply to that question was a reheating of her main message: ‘My focus last night was on those colleagues who were sadly losing their seats.’
She is not one of life’s most fluent communicators.
You slightly wonder why she went into a communications business like politics. But at least, by pushing out this expression of remorse to lost Tory figures, she showed a level of alertness to the party hierarchy’s mood that has not always been evident.
This reduced but not yet crushed Prime Minister had earlier paid a decidedly short pre-lunch visit to Buckingham Palace to see the Queen. The monarch managed to complete whatever business they had within a few minutes and Mrs May was driving back to Downing Street just in time for the royal dinner gong to be struck without a hold-up.
The May motorcade had left for the palace only at 12.20pm, her powderblue handbag being placed in the back of the limousine by a discreet female assistant, along with a couple of pink A4 folders.
The female officer driving the Jaguar looked a little like Amber Rudd. While the PM was off at the palace, Larry the Downing Street cat rolled in the dust.
It must be bliss, being a cat. No
worries. No expectations. By 12.50pm the motorcade was back, parking halfway up Downing Street so that she could do a short walk for the benefit of the cameras.
Mrs May alighted with her husband Philip at her side, her lips shut as tight as a dead mussel.
She stepped slowly to the lectern, shot a baleful glare at the noise of an overhead news helicopter, and said: ‘I will now form a government, a government that can provide certainty and lead Britain forward at this critical time for our country.’
Mr May waited just behind her, his posture slumped. Behind the scenes he will possibly have much propping up to do in the coming days.
Those of us in the street struggled to hear what she was saying, such was the racket from that broadcaster’s helicopter.
But her mood was apparent without any need for words: she was molten with anger and embarrassment. She was surely also haunted by a sense of failure. Regrets, regrets, regrets: if only she had not risked her authority.
All this must have been coursing through her, pumping through her, constantly, acid to the very sump of her being.
But she possibly felt she could not descend into self-pity and into expressions of party remorse in a statement about the creation of her new government.
She was leading the biggest party, yes, and the Tories’ share of the vote was high compared to many previous elections, yet the seats had not fallen her way. In her mouth there must have been the most terrible taste of ashes.
The voice had deepened. Fatigue and bitter disappointment.
She wore a dazzling blue outfit which must have been bought in the hope of a more upbeat trip to the palace. ‘The Government will deliver on the will of the British people by taking the United Kingdom out of the European Union,’ she claimed.
She mentioned fighting terrorism and she spoke, pointedly, of ‘the Conservative and Unionist Party’, which is what it officially is.
‘We will continue to work with our friends and allies in the Democratic Unionist Party in particular,’ she said. The Government she led would fulfil the promise ‘over the next five years’.
Five years? She may be lucky to achieve that.
Downing Street was packed with lensmen and broadcasters from near and far – French and Japanese and German TV jabbering away, their reporters rendered almost plastic by bright arc lights as they stood just five yards from the PM.
To be there at such moments feels surreal – as though you are on a film set, which in some ways is what it is. ‘Now let’s get to work,’ she said, bringing her speech to a brisk end.
And it was only then that we bystanders realised that she had failed to mention the losing candidates who had paid for her illadvised gamble with their seats. It was that omission that she later rectified.
DoWNING
Street orderlies rushed forward to remove the lectern while Mr and Mrs May made their way to the door of No 10 for an unsmiling, untriumphal pose.
They turned to face the door, expecting it to be opened for them at once, but for an awkward second or two the doorkeeper on the far side did not leap to attention. Perhaps he was trying to work out whether or not to let her in.
Eventually the door did swing open and we heard clapping from the staff as the Prime Minister returned to her duties. By her own hands she has made them all the more onerous.