May offered medicine without sugar-coating
She wasn’t optimistic, she wasn’t charming, she wasn’t inspiring: all true of the Prime Minister in her botched election campaign. But for the sake of completeness we ought to mention another failing: Theresa May was too honest.
She prided herself on being serious. She didn’t want to spin nonsense at the electorate, like David Cameron selling his EU renegotiation. She launched her leadership bid before a wall of books. She entered government with a reputation for making decisions tediously, after listening and learning.
The public liked it, or thought they did. Mrs May’s impressive authority instantly dispersed the sense of chaos following the Brexit vote. There was no reason, it seemed, why she couldn’t win an early election too. I was among those who thought it a good idea.
Except! Except it turns out her gravitas was just a side effect of her commitment to brutal honesty. Mrs May didn’t lose because she is an inauthentic person. She lost because she tried to be honest and, when that failed, had no capacity to spin. So she fell back on robotic obfuscation.
The honest truth is that after seven years of austerity, the books still aren’t balanced. Britain is still spending too much. Real wages are stagnant or falling, worsened by the weak pound, debt is high and the population is ageing. Brexit, meanwhile, is an unknown quantity.
While riding high, Mrs May used her political capital to be straightforward with voters. She admitted that Britain can’t afford benefits for all, like social care and bus passes for the wealthy. She made few guarantees on Brexit. Her proposition for public services was more of the same: gradually falling standards until the nation’s finances are repaired.
The dirty truth of campaigning, though, is that it involves sugarcoating. This was not impossible. Employment is at a record high. The deficit is down to 2.5 per cent of GDP and set to fall very slowly, allowing for a less austere mood. Brexit inspired millions of new voters to turn out and Mrs May might have captured that mood.
Instead, she was swept over by the tidal wave of jam and custard served up by Jeremy Corbyn. The Corbynista vision wasn’t sugar-coated: it was honeycomb all the way through.
During a Question Time held just after the election, one man declared that Mr Cameron had been a “reassuringly dishonest” chap. Mr Corbyn is, to some, a reassuringly optimistic fantasist. To be neither dishonest nor deluded, as Mrs May found out, can be a tough sell.
Over the weekend, I was on the radio with a member of the hard-left activist group called Momentum, when the poor fellow was asked what kind of Brexit Labour would support. “A people’s Brexit!” was the spluttered reply – as if the rest of us would prefer a dog’s Brexit. “What’s a people’s Brexit?” asked the bemused presenter. The answer, as far as I could make out, was that it might be a Brexit with lots of socialist bells and whistles sewn on.
Naturally, Labour didn’t much fancy talking about Brexit during the election, other than to condemn “the Tory hard Brexit”. Confusingly, its manifesto endorsed an approach very similar to “the Tories’ hard Brexit” by stating that Labour would take us out of the EU single market and then obtain “tariff-free access”. John Mcdonnell repeated this position on Sunday, only to be contradicted by Keir Starmer on Tuesday. Labour voters apparently chose whatever stance they liked best, with the young deciding Labour would stop Brexit, and the old Labour working class convinced the party would implement it.
Mr Corbyn would no doubt love to get Britain out of the single market, not in order to curb immigration, but so that he could ditch the EU’S rigorous state aid rules and bail out whatever industries he likes. His MPS might have other ideas. If, as looks likely, the Government has to negotiate Brexit with the other parties in Parliament to get any legislation through, perhaps we will finally find out what exactly a “people’s Brexit” is meant to be.
Some male dolphins court females by balancing sea sponges on their foreheads, scientists have discovered. This sounds absurd until you consider human mating rituals. Is it any sillier for a dolphin to put a sponge on his head than it is for a man to wear painfully tight jeans or bang on about existentialism? Are bower birds who amass arrays of coloured objects to woo females any more quaint than the friend of mine who carefully edited the movie Thor so that it contained a marriage proposal? Are flirting flamingoes, who copy each others’ every move, any more clueless than flirting couples who unconsciously mirror one another’s body language? Of course not.
A friend and I went separately to an exhibition of David Hockney’s work last month. I came out elated by his joyful paintings of nature. She, to my astonishment, declared it all horribly bleak, alluding to all sorts of family or relationship problems behind his sterile portraits and LA scenes. Both of us were right. This is exactly the sort of tension we stand to lose by barricading ourselves inside bubbles of self-affirming political news and culture. The best disagreements come from sharing knowledge, not partitioning it.