Theresa May’s honeymoon is over. The “safe pair of hands” she supposedly offered are anything but. I never much cared for her when she was home secretary, sending a fleet of vans around London telling immigrants to “fuck off back to where you came from” (I think those were the words, but even if they weren’t that’s what she meant) and her successful attempts to shrink the police service and destroy the morale of the officers who were left. I felt she was full of hot air and bluster, but when she became Tory leader and then prime minister, I assumed I was wrong. After all, those Tory MPs couldn’t all be wrong, could they?
Mrs May was, we were led to believe, a politician who thought things through and then came to a calm, considered decision. David Cameron might have been more showy and photogenic, but she was more focused on the issues. Ordinary people would be at the fore under her leadership, not the fat cats at the top. With Labour in chaos, she threatened to trample all over their territory. Until the end of of the summer recess. She started badly and got worse.
Initially, instead of laying down firm foundations and setting about policies to unite the country, she set about announcing two wildly controversial policies. First, her plan to bring more selection into schools by allowing more grammar schools and 100% faith schools followed by her staggering decision to allow the French and Chinese governments to build and finance Hinkley Point and, at the same time, ensuring we will face huge increases in fuel bills. She has run into an almighty mess with the first policy and gasps of disbelief with the other. This, from a safe pair of hands, is madness.
Second, she has proved so far to be a poor performer at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs). Granted, she succeeded David Cameron who was a fine performer at the dispatch box, but it is not that she suffers by comparison: she’s awful at it. Cameron was sharp, nimble-footed and able to think and react on his feet. May is none of these. Where Cameron destroyed Jeremy Corbyn on a weekly basis, May has done no such thing. And yesterday the unthinkable happened: she was destroyed at PMQs. For once, Corbyn arrived with six carefully prepared questions, his team having calculated that May doesn’t do off-the-cuff any better than their man and by anticipating her predictable non answers to his questions Labour’s accidental leader skewered the PM. In boxing parlance, the fight would have been stopped after the second question, so complete was Corbyn’s victory. I listened to PMQs on live radio and later watched it on TV, so shocked was I. If anything, May’s floundering was even worse when you could see her.
Even during May’s honeymoon period, she was vacuous on our exit from the EU. “Brexit means Brexit”, she parroted repeatedly, without once explaining what on earth Brexit looked like and the three key Brexiteers she appointed to oversee negotiations, Boris Johnson, David Davis and ‘Dr’ Liam Fox are simultaneously at crossed swords and loose ends, as well as being utterly clueless. If you didn’t know better, and actually I don’t, you’d think she had set them up to fail, as fail they will surely will. But why?
Early days for Mrs May but looking at the stunned Tory faces behind her in the Commons yesterday they had the look of men and women who had suddenly realised that their new leader wasn’t who and what they expected her to be. Every dog has its day and maybe yesterday’s was Corbyn’s and perhaps May will pull it together next week. But what if she doesn’t?
There is no possibility that a Labour Party ‘led’ by Corbyn can beat May at a general election, regardless of how bad she performs in the Commons and elsewhere, but May’s real opposition at the moment sits behind her. A sustained period of parliamentary ineptitude would see her jettisoned by the suits, quicker than she could say “Brexit means Brexit”. Unlike Labour, the Conservative Party exists purely to win. They killed off Thatcher after three election wins and Iain Duncan Smith before he was allowed to fight an election in the first place.
If you’re getting skewered by Jeremy Corbyn at PMQs, your colleagues will know there is a problem. She’s got time to turn it round but less than she might think.
