May would fare all the better for making good friends of her foes

Nigel Farage and former Remainers have been exiled – but involving them would be a better strategy

Assuming they do eventually meet, Theresa May and Donald Trump should get on like a house on fire. When they’re done agreeing on immigration, they can chew the fat about management: trust no one except your closest aides; remain suspicious of party colleagues who disdained you before your ascent; bear grudges and settle scores; no one who has ever wronged you can be forgiven or embraced.

Comparing May’s management style to the demagogue in DC is a little unkind, but perhaps still less hurtful than the other parallel being drawn in Whitehall. Among senior civil servants, it is now routine to compare May’s Downing Street to that of Gordon Brown, and not just because he, too, came to the job unelected.

Mandarins see a painfully familiar method – an unsleeping attention to detail and an iron control over even minor decisions, often made slowly – and a similar attitude to working with others: do as you’re told, or else; cross us and you’re dead.

There are a few problems with this, not least that even the Stakhanovite PM and her team cannot bury everyone on their long list of enemies. Just ask Nigel Farage, who torments May with every breath he takes, just as he did her predecessor.

David Cameron will go to his grave insisting that he had no choice but to call the referendum that ended his career, since a Britain that gave birth to Ukip would always demand its say on the EU. But what if in 2006, instead of dismissing Ukip as “closet racists”, he’d promised to listen to them on immigration and sovereignty, hugging them close, not pushing them away?

Or, having conceded the referendum, what if he’d followed his 2015 general election win with an offer to bring Ukip into the fold, with seats in the Lords to reflect the almost four million people who voted for the party? Many Brexiteers, like many Trumpists, voted as they did because they felt the people running their country didn’t listen to them; a leader who’d listened to Mr Farage and his followers might have calmed their anger enough to have won his referendum and saved his job.

Likewise, the Republican elite that derided Trump and, by inference, his audience. That created the conditions for his hostile takeover of the party. Mrs May would do well to learn the lessons of Cameron and the Republicans: hold your nose and invite men like Trump and Farage into your tent. They will surely make a stink, but that is better than them burning your tent down from the outside, peeing on the ashes and pitching their own.

It’s not just Mr Farage who is outside Mrs May’s small tent. A significant number of Conservatives in Parliament feel frozen out, seemingly punished for the crime of backing the Remain cause Mrs May would rather you forgot that she too supported.

A sharp example came at the Spectator’s recent Parliamentarian of the Year dinner, when the Prime Minister donned hard hat and hi-vis vest to mock the compère, George Osborne. A good gag, but with a cold edge: publicly mocking a man you brusquely sacked is not an act of warm, inclusive leadership.

“A lot of people in the party feel she won’t listen to them because they voted Remain. Most of them are staying quiet for now, but they could make life very difficult for her, especially when George encourages it,” says a Cabinet minister, predicting trouble if, as many expect, May is forced by the Supreme Court to seek Parliament’s approval before triggering Article 50 on Brexit.

Most ministers are left out, too, and not just the usual suspects like Liam Fox, accused, sometimes unfairly, of scheming against his colleagues and defying the imperial will of No 10.

Philip Hammond, who should be May’s closest ally, is kept at arm’s length, while his Treasury officials feel positively unwelcome in Downing Street. “They don’t listen to us, and when they do, they don’t trust what we say,” says a senior Treasury type.

That’s not completely unreasonable. Economic experts should show a little more humility after the past decade; the Treasury had become the spoiled child of Whitehall and was overdue a spank. But having delivered it, Mrs May should let HMT off the naughty step and start listening.

And not just to the Treasury. A siege mentality was an effective way to run the Home Office. It’s not the best way to lead a government and a nation heading into the most far-reaching and potentially divisive recasting of our international role since Suez.

Brexit means Brexit, but what will that mean? A leaked report from a Deloitte consultant yesterday surprised precisely no one in Whitehall by suggesting that the Government has yet to agree a clear position on the sort of exit from the EU we should seek. Agreeing that position, then moving to achieve it, cannot be done by diktat from No 10; getting the best deal will require listening to as many people as possible, both hard Brexiteers and moderate Remainers. Or does May believe her team is so overburdened with talent that she can afford to be without the services of Osborne, or Michael Gove?

Instead of trying to keep them outside the stockade, why not co-opt them all? Draw them into cross-party commissions and study groups and debates where they can feel loved and you can steal their ideas – and bind them to the outcome of your negotiations. And when you finally get to the negotiating table in Brussels, the other side will know you speak for the broadest coalition of voters.

Brexit, like Trump’s election, could strain social and political unity. But history suggests that for leaders of ambition, stature and generosity, far wider gaps can be bridged.

As the American Civil War drew to a close, Abraham Lincoln was confronted by an angry northern lady over his approach to the confederates. Mindful of the need to reconcile the warring halves of the nation, he had spoken of a lasting peace “with malice for none, charity for all”. Why, the lady demanded, did he insist on regarding the rebels as people who had made a mistake, not irredeemable enemies who must be destroyed?

No prime minister is ever short of enemies, and Theresa May in particular should ponder Lincoln’s reply: “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”