May’s car-crash conference left many doubting her competence
The Prime Minister’s woeful performance in Manchester can only add to calls for her to step down
ASKED by his executioner if he had any last words, the legendary outlaw Cherokee Bill was said to have replied, “I didn’t come here to make a speech, I came here to die.” Politically, Theresa May’s Manchester speech left her in similar territory. As the dust settles on an outing dogged by Boris Johnson’s loose lips and a podium performance that will be remembered as one of the most blighted by a party leader, a sombre mood among Tories is curdling to near despair.
May went to Manchester with one admittedly Herculean task: persuading her party that she is a transitional candidate worth giving time to while the government toils across the obstaclestrewn plains of Brexit negotiation. In the event, poor preparation, exhaustion, panic and sheer bad luck meant that the faithful left with less faith in her than they started out with.
Even the daft protestor touched a sore nerve with his unnerving P45 flourish. Had he brandished the prop at, say David Cameron or Tony Blair in their prime, it would have simply looked like a silly joke. But even as they booed the foolish gesture, the audience got the underlying cruelty of the gesture: May looks eminently sackable — probably more so now than when she arrived in Manchester.
At least adversity is bringing out the best in some. Home Secretary Amber Rudd was a reminder that fissiparous teams need loyalists to hold them together. I was impressed too by AnneMarie Trevelyan, the cheery Berwicku p o n -T w e e d M P, one of few backbenchers to put herself out by vigorously defending May’s grit in carrying on in extremis.
But dutiful fealty, however admirable, is not the same as respect and the real casualty of the week is May’s authority. That brings us to the competence question. Any politician can have an off-day (Tony Blair tanking at the Women’s Institute remains a classic). But bad luck and faulty preparation are inextricably linked. An ally of May whispers that the problem stemmed, “from her determination to do too much at conference and please everyone by saying yes to so many requests”. May’s response to pressure is to work even harder. She wanted to plead her case with journalists and constituency folk and be seen to connect with MPs in the wake of an election campaign that made her look stilted and remote.
As a result she looked tired and on edge from the moment she arrived on stage — and I say that as someone who enjoyed her command of the conference stage as a female Home Secretary. The May we saw yesterday looked a long way from her old, spry self. An old hand at such events adds that we civilians underestimate how much nervous energy goes into a major conference speech. William Hague and David Cameron took advice from top sporting performers on conserving energy. Blair used to go to bed and leave his script team haggling over the details until the small hours, tweaking it on the hoof in the morning.
But besides the appearance of someone ground down by the cares of office lurk two broader worries for the party. One is how to tackle the busy political autumn when parliament returns next week. The second is a growing nervousness that the Leftpopulism of Jeremy Corbyn could be much harder to beat than the Tories expect or can handle.
Can May and her team dissect Labour’s dubious claim to be able to ditch all tuition fees — or will the plan to freeze fees over £9,000 and raise the level of income at which graduates will repay it disappear into the bottom drawer of managerialist solutions that please barely anyone? The nightmare, s ay s o n e mi n i s t e r s , is that a ny inc rement al change l e ave s the government open to being ”consistently outbid by Jeremy Corbyn” in an auction of “fantasy maths”.
Still, Corbyn cannot be blamed for everything. The obstacle course of the upcoming sessions of parliament has been made tougher by No 10’s insistence in the Queen’s Speech on packing the legislative programme to bursting. The intention is to show that the May government is not a one-trick pony. So, besides the intricacies Great Repeal Bill and accompanying rows over the appropriation of ”Henry VIII powers” as parliament undoes legislation that has already been enacted, the Government is about to embark on a concatenation of bills only loosely connected by any overarching message of outlook.
These range from consumer-friendly legislation, which will set off complaints of unfair constraint from business, agricultural subsidies ( a lw ays producing guaranteed annoyance), a commitment on council housing and energy price controls that sound like a revival of Blue Labour and various bits of housekeeping, ranging from nuclear safety to employment rights. Any number of these could produce Government defeats (and if Labour whips are smart, they will be piling up amendments to garner crossparty support).
The overall effect is displacement activity. When May did put herself on the line yesterday with a pledge to do more to relieve the housing problem, a moment that looked like it really motivated the Prime Minister was soon lost in the haze of vaguer commitments. Rarely has the case for government doing less, but doing it better, been made more clear.
After the Manchester Disunited roadshow however, the question is not whether May can join the dots on an over-complicated political scatter diagram. It is whether she can hold together her government at all. Put bluntly, to issue one apology at conference after a bad election is tolerable. To have to apologise to colleagues, as she must, for another write-off looks inept. That is the corrosive charge laid at May’s door and she does not have long to overturn it. Anne McElvoy is also senior editor at The Economist
To issue one apology after a bad election is tolerable. To have to apologise to colleagues for another write-off looks inept