Floundering in aspic?
Is it just me, or is the new Tory government regime under Mrs May distinctly under-impressive it its performance? Whether it’s a matter of fact, or just an impression I’ve gained, but it doesn’t seem to be scoring many runs at the moment.
The common view within the Westminster ‘bubble’ is that nobody doubts that Mrs May has a significant capacity for hard work and attention to detail (albeit there may be a detectable hint in the latter ‘positive’ that she’s actually also hopeless at delegating and/or trusting others) or that she’s a relatively ‘safe pair of hands’ to have on the tiller of power.
Dear old Ken Clarke was offering endorsement of the last of the above on Andrew Neil’s BBC Sunday Politics show at the weekend, this just after he’d admitted calling her a “bloody difficult woman” about six months ago in a conversation with Malcolm Rifkind in the Sky News studio that he thought was ‘off camera’ and not being recorded when in fact it was.
Let’s just examine some of the evidence.
Early on – both in her campaign for the Tory leadership and upon becoming Prime Minister – Mrs May made much of her ‘head down and get on with the job’ approach, her humility and her lack of a ‘big personality’ (“You won’t find me in the bar of the House of Commons” or similar was one comment I seem to recall). Perhaps this was just a front deliberately and simultaneously designed to differentiate her from the other contenders, not least one Boris Johnson, and present herself as the serious, sober and ‘safe’ candidate.
This marketing ploy was carried forward into her early days as our new Prime Minister.
Who can forget her Margaret Thatcher-like demeanour and words as she arrived outside Number 10 Downing Street?
In Thatcher’s (1979) case it was her cod-pious, sanctimonious, quoting from the words of St Francis of Assisi: “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope”.
For May it was a call to arms and national unity with an inclusive theme – her words are worth repeating:
“[It means] fighting against the burning injustice that, if you’re born poor, you will die on average 9 years earlier than others.
If you’re black, you’re treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than if you’re white.
If you’re a white, working-class boy, you’re less likely than anybody else in Britain to go to university.
If you’re at a state school, you’re less likely to reach the top professions than if you’re educated privately.
If you’re a woman, you will earn less than a man. If you suffer from mental health problems, there’s not enough help to hand.
If you’re young, you’ll find it harder than ever before to own your own home.
But the mission to make Britain a country that works for everyone means more than fighting these injustices. If you’re from an ordinary working class family, life is much harder than many people in Westminster realise. You have a job but you don’t always have job security. You have your own home, but you worry about paying a mortgage. You can just about manage but you worry about the cost of living and getting your kids into a good school.
If you’re one of those families, if you’re just managing, I want to address you directly.
I know you’re working around the clock, I know you’re doing your best, and I know that sometimes life can be a struggle. The government I lead will be driven not by the interests of the privileged few, but by yours.
We will do everything we can to give you more control over your lives. When we take the big calls, we’ll think not of the powerful, but you. When we pass new laws, we’ll listen not to the mighty but to you. When it comes to taxes, we’ll prioritise not the wealthy, but you. When it comes to opportunity, we won’t entrench the advantages of the fortunate few. We will do everything we can to help anybody, whatever your background, to go as far as your talents will take you.”
Heady stuff, of course. But even as I watched her delivering it I had that sinking underlying feeling that it was simply straightforward ‘politico-speak culled by the yard from some Whitehall or Conservative Central Office database, as compiled by some committee of policy wonks just out of Oxbridge and now following the well-worn Establishment path from student debating society to safe rural Tory seat in the shires’.
In other words, complete bollocks.
Since then, of course, we’ve had a series of developments that have boded not at all well. I refer to the likes of:
Mrs May being a deeply uninspiring performer in the Commons. Trying to disguise the fact she has no sense of humour, she has resorted to gag-writers who aren’t very good and that fact combined with her clunky by-numbers delivery – and of course the fact that Jeremy Corbyn is playing opposite her – has reduced Prime Minister’s Question Time to a snore-bore.
Boris being regularly slapped down and made fun of.
The Mrs May-prompted announcement of a return to the expansion of the 1950s-style grammar schools. This has since caused huge outrage within the teaching professional and amongst its regulators, experts and Opposition MPs. As I type this, I’m sensing that the entire policy is either going to be watered down to nothing or (preferably) dropped altogether and hopefully forgotten.
The ‘Trouser-gate’ spat with discarded junior minister Nicky Morgan [opening with Morgan’s snide comment about Mrs May’s £995 pair of brown leather trousers, responded to ungraciously by one of Mrs May’s female ‘attack dogs’ ordering a male colleague not to bring “that woman” to any more briefing meetings and then by the media sniffing out that Morgan herself had been spotted poncing up to the door of Number 10 sporting a £950 Mulberry handbag].
The Government’s dithering over its EU departure negotiating position, which has caused nothing but bad publicity for Mrs May and her team. This is largely because most observers suspect (or know) that it’s partly caused by the fact that the Government doesn’t have the faintest clue how best to proceed and is blustering for time, desperately hoping that somewhere along the line over the horizon is going to come some form of US cavalry to save the day, by which I mean to refer to a stance – any stance – that will make some kind of logic and won’t get laughed off the stage. There doesn’t seem to be one coming any time soon and in the meantime the Government has been copping serious flak and will continue to do so unless and until (if ever) it comes up with something.
The NHS funding problems – the latest example of which is the crisis announced this week on social care in the community. The budgets were systematically and incrementally butchered under the 2010-2015 George Osborne austerity regime and the direct effects of that policy have now come home to roost with bells on. Currently, as far as I can see, nothing short of throwing a whole new stack of money (which we haven’t got and presumably cannot afford to borrow) at the issue will make the slightest difference.
Despite the fact that the now politically-retired ex-Premier David Cameron is justifiably to blame for the Brexit mess we find ourselves in, he may well be secretly enjoying the fact he’s no longer in charge and that ‘new kid on the block’ Mrs May has seemingly begun by wading through treacle brought about by both random events and her own cack-handed attempts to ‘make a difference’ and establish her own individual mark on the British political scene (the better to secure her supposed ‘legacy’).
At this point it is worth reminding ourselves of Enoch Powell’s celebrated dictum, contained in his 1977 biography of Joseph Chamberlain:
‘All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.’
If, like me, you regard modern Western ‘First World’ capitalist democratic societies as being by their very nature completely ungovernable in any rational sense, it’s often semi-amusing looking on as, if they should be lucky enough, each bright young politician – after perhaps each not-so-bright and not-so-young politician – eventually comes to power and thereby has to confront this inconvenient but absolute truth which they secretly knew all along but never acknowledged.
