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| Theresa May is in a Brexit muddle and I’m muddled as to what to think of her | Theresa May is in a Brexit muddle and I’m muddled as to what to think of her |
| (about 1 hour later) | |
| There’s nothing new about the appetite for toppling statues. All the same, this year has been astonishingly harsh on reputation, both past and present. From General Robert E Lee to Harvey Weinstein, there have been powerful reminders that it is a fragile thing. It’s been a big year for changing your mind. | There’s nothing new about the appetite for toppling statues. All the same, this year has been astonishingly harsh on reputation, both past and present. From General Robert E Lee to Harvey Weinstein, there have been powerful reminders that it is a fragile thing. It’s been a big year for changing your mind. |
| When Theresa May became Tory leader and prime minister 18 months ago, toppling in a metaphorical way her immediate predecessors, I found myself quite admiring her. She seemed able to reach out beyond her own party, mainly by being different from what had recently gone before, and also partly because there was a great national exhalation of breath in relief that she was not Andrea Leadsom. | |
| But that wasn’t all of it. She sounded as though she understood that the referendum result was about more than anti-immigration sentiment and hostility to Brussels – that it was a symptom of something profound gnawing at national cohesion. She was conspicuously unlike David Cameron or George Osborne, and seemed as if she might be the voice of an older, more authentic kind of provincial Conservatism. If there was a Tory leader capable of helping the national psyche through the nightmare of waking up on 24 June 2016 and discovering a great sinkhole had opened up on the familiar map of the British isles, cutting off Scotland, Northern Ireland and most cities from all the solid stuff in between, then she was it. | But that wasn’t all of it. She sounded as though she understood that the referendum result was about more than anti-immigration sentiment and hostility to Brussels – that it was a symptom of something profound gnawing at national cohesion. She was conspicuously unlike David Cameron or George Osborne, and seemed as if she might be the voice of an older, more authentic kind of provincial Conservatism. If there was a Tory leader capable of helping the national psyche through the nightmare of waking up on 24 June 2016 and discovering a great sinkhole had opened up on the familiar map of the British isles, cutting off Scotland, Northern Ireland and most cities from all the solid stuff in between, then she was it. |
| Also, I had interviewed her very early in her career as an MP, and wrote then that she might one day get to the top. | Also, I had interviewed her very early in her career as an MP, and wrote then that she might one day get to the top. |
| It felt good to have a woman in No 10 who, on the back of a genuine record of supporting women to become MPs – and at the Home Office taking up causes such as domestic violence – was using her position to promote other women up the rungs of government. In her stiff and charmless manner, she seemed an appealing antidote to her sleek predecessor, and the grandstanding of some of her colleagues. She was a woman who might just have the skillset needed to show the whole country that politics still worked. | It felt good to have a woman in No 10 who, on the back of a genuine record of supporting women to become MPs – and at the Home Office taking up causes such as domestic violence – was using her position to promote other women up the rungs of government. In her stiff and charmless manner, she seemed an appealing antidote to her sleek predecessor, and the grandstanding of some of her colleagues. She was a woman who might just have the skillset needed to show the whole country that politics still worked. |
| Since she squandered her majority she has looked like a hostage victim. I’ve felt little sympathy | Since she squandered her majority she has looked like a hostage victim. I’ve felt little sympathy |
| Then came her conference speech in October 2016: a speech so grotesquely partisan, so dismissive of the need for leadership that spoke for the whole country, and so careless of old and valued ties with Europe that it should have come as no surprise when six months later she launched an electoral coup. That went just as well as it deserved to. | Then came her conference speech in October 2016: a speech so grotesquely partisan, so dismissive of the need for leadership that spoke for the whole country, and so careless of old and valued ties with Europe that it should have come as no surprise when six months later she launched an electoral coup. That went just as well as it deserved to. |
| In the months since squandering her majority, she has flitted pale and tired across pavements or sat wanly alone at negotiating tables looking like the broken victim of ruthless hostage-takers. I have felt no more than a zephyr of human sympathy for her, so faint it would barely break the surface tension of an Italian lake. | In the months since squandering her majority, she has flitted pale and tired across pavements or sat wanly alone at negotiating tables looking like the broken victim of ruthless hostage-takers. I have felt no more than a zephyr of human sympathy for her, so faint it would barely break the surface tension of an Italian lake. |
| But then I began to consider how history saw another, very different female MP. Barbara Castle’s career spanned the three decades from the end of the second world war to the accession of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and for most of it she was deeply underestimated, often dismissed and regularly scorned by her party. Only with New Labour did she find herself, to her slightly sceptical delight, recast as the Pasionaria of the left. | But then I began to consider how history saw another, very different female MP. Barbara Castle’s career spanned the three decades from the end of the second world war to the accession of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and for most of it she was deeply underestimated, often dismissed and regularly scorned by her party. Only with New Labour did she find herself, to her slightly sceptical delight, recast as the Pasionaria of the left. |
| But even then, neither she nor anyone else much valued the truly brave and remarkable acts that studded her life in politics. Her courage in the 1950s, for example, when almost alone she took on the military and political establishment, as well as many ex-servicemen in her own Blackburn constituency, to try to bring to justice British soldiers in Kenya and Cyprus for their brutal and sometimes murderous treatment of prisoners fighting in anticolonial movements. | But even then, neither she nor anyone else much valued the truly brave and remarkable acts that studded her life in politics. Her courage in the 1950s, for example, when almost alone she took on the military and political establishment, as well as many ex-servicemen in her own Blackburn constituency, to try to bring to justice British soldiers in Kenya and Cyprus for their brutal and sometimes murderous treatment of prisoners fighting in anticolonial movements. |
| Yet within a few years, the radical rebel morphed into a pragmatic and highly effective minister. She brought in the breath test and seatbelts and equal pay: life-changing legislation that was never seen, in that patriarchal world, as anything other than a kind of minor-key accompaniment to the dramatic reforms emanating from Roy Jenkins in the Home Office. Remembering her only as a figure of the left may be a misrepresentation that she chose for herself, but it is still a misrepresentation. | Yet within a few years, the radical rebel morphed into a pragmatic and highly effective minister. She brought in the breath test and seatbelts and equal pay: life-changing legislation that was never seen, in that patriarchal world, as anything other than a kind of minor-key accompaniment to the dramatic reforms emanating from Roy Jenkins in the Home Office. Remembering her only as a figure of the left may be a misrepresentation that she chose for herself, but it is still a misrepresentation. |
| My other comparator is a figure of the right, the reviled Stanley Baldwin. Dull and prosaic, in his lifetime he was dismissed by John Maynard Keynes as someone who “sentimentalises about his own stupidity”, and of whom Churchill said it would be ”better if he had never lived”. Yet Baldwin is more than the prime minister who failed to rearm (wisely preferring butter to guns) and presided unfeelingly over the Depression. He is also the figure who shaped, through his speeches and writing, a prewar British identity that served as an antidote to the radical left and the fascist right. He is the lumbering politician marked by an uninspiring moderation and feeble opposition to some of the nastier elements in his party, who also succeeded in preserving parliamentary democracy as it crumbled across most of Europe. He is the politician, I would argue, who unwittingly made possible both survival through the blitz and the Labour revolution after 1945, surely one the greatest transfers of assets ever achieved in peacetime. | My other comparator is a figure of the right, the reviled Stanley Baldwin. Dull and prosaic, in his lifetime he was dismissed by John Maynard Keynes as someone who “sentimentalises about his own stupidity”, and of whom Churchill said it would be ”better if he had never lived”. Yet Baldwin is more than the prime minister who failed to rearm (wisely preferring butter to guns) and presided unfeelingly over the Depression. He is also the figure who shaped, through his speeches and writing, a prewar British identity that served as an antidote to the radical left and the fascist right. He is the lumbering politician marked by an uninspiring moderation and feeble opposition to some of the nastier elements in his party, who also succeeded in preserving parliamentary democracy as it crumbled across most of Europe. He is the politician, I would argue, who unwittingly made possible both survival through the blitz and the Labour revolution after 1945, surely one the greatest transfers of assets ever achieved in peacetime. |
| So maybe we should look again at May. Perhaps these lurches and reverses, the muddle and the brinkmanship over where the country is going and what Brexit the desperate disappointment of remainers, is for – horrible and dispiriting as it is – is in some way necessary in the process of coming to terms with the result. | So maybe we should look again at May. Perhaps these lurches and reverses, the muddle and the brinkmanship over where the country is going and what Brexit the desperate disappointment of remainers, is for – horrible and dispiriting as it is – is in some way necessary in the process of coming to terms with the result. |
| Maybe being generally dismissed as inadequate and incompetent gives her the space to stagger towards a deal that does the least harm to jobs and the economy and the most good for national cohesion: a deal that will be flawed and unsatisfactory to everyone, but all the same a deal – one that would maybe be harder, if not impossible, to reach if it was approached in a straight line. | Maybe being generally dismissed as inadequate and incompetent gives her the space to stagger towards a deal that does the least harm to jobs and the economy and the most good for national cohesion: a deal that will be flawed and unsatisfactory to everyone, but all the same a deal – one that would maybe be harder, if not impossible, to reach if it was approached in a straight line. |
| • Anne Perkins is a Guardian columnist | • Anne Perkins is a Guardian columnist |