Demonising of Mrs May

She’s been accused of everything from planning the attack in Manchester to causing the London inferno. If these hysterical lies don’t stop, says QUENTIN LETTS, we’ll end up with Corbyn as PM

NOT since the early days of September 1997, after Princess Diana’s death, has political aggression in London felt this unhinged.

Back then, there had just been a fatal accident and the mood became frighteningly inflamed. An overexcited media accentuated the zealotry of a few hotheaded republicans until it seemed the entire country was a-boil.

Most unfairly, one woman (the Queen) became the lightning rod for that fury. She had failed to fly a flag at half-mast over Buckingham Palace. She and her family were ‘dysfunctional’ and wicked and quite beyond salvation. She should be toppled!

Twenty years on, something similar has happened, but the woman who has this time been picked on as the scapegoat is our Prime Minister, Theresa May.

After a spate of fatal incidents, Mrs May is being held up as the culprit. From the way some rabble- rousers are behaving, you would think she, personally, had set the Grenfell Tower fire which led to that awful disaster. You would think that she, personally, commissioned the terrorist atrocities in Manchester, Borough Market and Finsbury Park.

Agitators

Comedian Rufus Hound supported the suggestion aired on Twitter — where he has 1.2 million followers — that in the heat of an election it was ‘fortunate’ timing for Mrs May that children and families were blown to pieces in Manchester. He was seriously suggesting that the suicide bomber was working with the agreement of the Government.

What sort of person makes such a claim? Yet Hound and his ilk — he was not the only one to make such sick comments — were believed by enough impressionable souls to stoke fury at Mrs May for that dreadful Manchester attack. No doubt that helped the Labour party’s vote share.

Socialist Workers Party agitators, a few malevolent celebrities and even one or two Tory party insiders are now putting it about that Mrs May is uninterested in the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire. She is a cold-hearted monster. She is ‘dysfunctional’. She should be toppled!

This criticism is no more justified today than it was in 1997. The difference is that this time it is not the House of Windsor the mob wants to overthrow. It is British parliamentary democracy, at a time when Brexit negotiations with the EU have just begun, and political stability is essential.

I doubt I could ever be mistaken for Theresa May’s greatest fan. She had a dreadful election campaign and made many mistakes.

At a rally in Twickenham, ten days before the nation went to the polls, I put it to her that she was a bit of a ‘glumbucket’. She gave me a filthy look.

My ‘glumbucket’ caused a frisson on social media, where Leftie Tweeters and Facebookers leaped for joy, suggesting that the Mail had ‘turned on Mrs May’.

No it hadn’t. But she was obviously a bit of a clunker on the campaign trail. That is a quite different thing from the bizarre and vicious hysteria now being directed at Mrs May. She has been castigated as a medieval witch, a weirdo, as someone ‘dead to emotion or empathy’ ( sisterly Polly Toynbee in the Guardian).

Mrs May’s sin? She did not hug Grenfell Tower families in front of the TV cameras when she visited the site hours after the blaze. Instead she talked to the emergency services and decided she would not barge in on the grieving survivors.

Her low-key, aloof-looking visit was contrasted with the emotive response of Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour leader has turned into a veritable one-man touchy-feely squad, hunting down disaster victims so that he can feel their pain.

Anyone inside the M25 who is involved in a disaster in the coming days should beware. Within hours you may find a bearded crypto- communist slipping his arm round your shoulder, never mind the fact that he never offered any sympathy to the victims of his beloved IRA heroes.

In London, and on social media, it has become open season on Mrs May. She can do no right. Had she indeed been photographed weeping with Grenfell Tower families, critics would probably have accused her of milking the moment and even of having some sort of nervous breakdown.

When it was discovered that she and the Archbishop of Canterbury had met and prayed, that merely set off another round of head-shaking about how out of touch she was with metropolitan Britain.

Prayer? The chatterati slapped their foreheads and said it was almost time to call the men in white coats.

From this kneejerk criticism of Mrs May’s alleged lack of sympathy to the fire victims, the agitprop crowd make a wild leap to parliamentary politics. They say that Mrs May ‘lost the election’ and that she should resign and let Mr Corbyn form a Government.

This is delusional. Labour fell miles short of being the biggest party. Mrs May won 42.4 per cent of the vote — a hefty rise on what David Cameron managed in 2015, and almost as good as Tony Blair won in 1997 when he achieved a landslide. Mrs May did not secure a Commons majority, but such are the vagaries of our electoral system.

Falsehood

This Corbyn argument that he has somehow been cheated of power is a rank falsehood. It will leave the voters who did support the Tories over Labour feeling puzzled and ignored. I suspect it will do Labour no good at all at the next election, whenever it is. And there lies the big question.

Is the Labour leadership — and its rent- a- mob friends behind the ‘Day of Rage’ march planned for central London today — going to let Mrs May bring stability to our country? Or are these adolescent revolutionaries going to continue doing their damnedest to force another election?

One wonders what Brenda of Bristol — the woman who responded with such horror to the idea of this month’s poll — would have to say to them about that. Brenda might also have a few strong words for government ministers and Tory MPs, who are said to be plotting to replace Mrs May.

Was Boris on manoeuvres with Michael Fallon when they were photographed chatting privately on a pub bench in Kent the other evening? Is David Davis considering taking a punt?

Even Chancellor Philip Hammond — a politician so stupefyingly dull he makes my glumbucket Theresa look like a frilly- skirted circus trapeze artiste — is reported to fancy his chances. Hammond! In saner times he would be lucky to be Secretary of State for Sewage Works.

We must hope that reports of such Cabinet plots are no more accurate than the wildly unfair denunciations of Mrs May’s ‘deadness of emotion’.

Poison

This Prime Minister, daughter of an old-school Anglican parson, may not be much good at radiating her feelings in this snowflake-millennial world, but that is not to say she does not have them. She strikes me as a decent, Christian woman who is trying her best to restore a sense of calm after her near-ruinous mistake of calling an early election.

Having spent several days in Herefordshire rather than in the cauldron of London, I doubt that many more than a few hundred hard-Left fanatics truly swallow this poison about Mrs May having conspired in the terror attacks.

Similarly, I suspect most fair onlookers would accept that her failure to hug survivors of the Grenfell fire was evidence of nothing more than a rather oldfashioned belief in respecting the privacy of the bereaved.

For goodness’ sake — and for the sake of our long- term stability — let’s get behind the poor lady. Lay off Mrs May!

Until Brexit is completed, she is the only possible person for No. 10. And do not for a second forget that she is our most effective — possibly only — bulwark against the unthinkable rise of Jeremy Corbyn to the office of prime minister (alongside his Marxist chum John McDonnell). That is an outcome that would damage Britain’s economic future, and our place in the world, more than anything imaginable.

One can only hope that, like the heatwave, these febrile times abate. They did in 1997. Our wonderful Queen saw off the raucous mob. Let’s hope Mrs May will do the same.