Theresa May became Prime Minister in July 2016, and for the next 11 months she had a command over national life not seen for a generation. No rise to power has ever been as swift or as unanimous. Theresa May did not have a policy, but a personality – and it inaugurated a new era which we have not yet left.
Theresa May was drawn from that class of upright professionals of the southern commuter belt which forms the upper stratum of Middle England. Though they look to the urban centres they are devoted to their local area, and take it upon themselves to run the different fêtes and festivals of suburban life. In continental Europe there are tens of millions of these people in every country, where they are the nucleus of a democratic citizenry. In Britain this class is too slender; hence their status as something of a local elite. They provide the officer corps of local government, and until very recently dominated it completely. They are almost always royalists, and form the social base of a lingering Anglicanism. They are conscientious, dutiful, and are the last repository of something like middle-class virtue as imagined by the British of the 1950s.
Of this class, May was a representative member. In Theresa May, mid-century Britain seemed to walk again. She was at heart a puzzled Anglican, a little at odds with some features of Blairite society but unfailingly obedient to its premises. She seemed to embody an old-fashioned tradition of public service. She was disciplined, courteous, and was not given to showmanship. One could superficially see in May an end to two decades of spin. She was shy and was not a strong speaker, but when set against these other virtues this only increased her appeal. It hinted at a greater depth of moral seriousness, of a determination to, in her words, “get on with the job“, while others strut and caper.
Theresa May’s personality has made her the cultural symbol of our age, but she only embraced it later in life. Like almost everyone, May’s public persona was subject to change. During the Cameron years she was cast as Right-wing enforcer, an old role that has ruined nearly all its occupants. She wore her hair in a threatening grey bob, and piloted the ‘hostile environment’ policy, which demanded that entrants into the country file their papers on time. But sometimes she pitched in the other direction, and spoke of racism in the police force. This was political hedging, but it was entirely unsophisticated, and only succeeded in annoying her colleagues. Though she held one of the great offices almost no one spoke of her as a future Prime Minister. There were no Mayites, still less was there a Mayism. David Cameron derided her as a “submarine”, and planned to sack her.
Theresa May’s career was over. New life came unexpectedly with a referendum, which, true to form, she took no part in. She quietly endorsed Remain and then fled into hiding. This was May’s first great stroke; when the smoke cleared in June 2016 she found herself hailed by Britain’s governing class as someone above the acrimony of the previous months. Theresa May had ducked the great issue of her time; this was now recast as an unshowy commitment to public service. Nowhere was it suggested that someone of her high office might have owed the British people an open avowal of her beliefs. Modern Britain, which hates debate, sees statesmanship as the ability to rise above the din of party. This idea is vulgar and authoritarian in premise, and May was its first great beneficiary.
Moreover, May-the-woman seemed to capture the prevailing mood just after the referendum, or, at least, the mood of its governing class. This was enough to propel her to Downing Street. Theresa May’s rise to power was the result of some of the worst features of English public life, some new, some old. One was the wry tenderness for Anglicanism common to Britain’s ruling classes. This kind of affection is irreligious, but defends the Established Church on aesthetic grounds and because of its assumed social role. The idea is a hackneyed one; it has been the public doctrine of Britain for about two centuries. In a time of general confusion, the political nation could find strange refuge in May’s personal piety. The second was the psycho-sexual hang-ups of Britain’s print media, particularly of its Tory wing. Journalists of the British Right filed sweaty articles about the no-nonsense May crushing Toryboys Johnson and Gove underfoot with her leopard-print high heels. This imagery, with its suggestions of sexual thraldom, was very much of the stunted bum-slap Carry On variety. Third was the new awe for unity and order. In the immediate aftermath of the referendum, Britain’s governing class did everything to gin up a state of crisis. Much was made of the supposed mess that bickering politicians had created; the answer was a caretaker Government to clean it up. In this way, a democratic vote was recast as an ipso facto national emergency. The sense of crisis; the showy disdain for ‘division’; the pleas for unity – these are always the first murmurs of democratic backsliding, and the Britain of 2016 proved no exception.
For these reasons, both personal and political, May could embody the idea of national caretaker that Britain’s rulers cried out for. Theresa May was happy to oblige them. Her pitch for the leadership was insulting in the extreme. May presented herself as a force for stability, and in doing so she supposed that there was instability. But there was none. What had just occurred was a perfectly ordinary democratic exercise. The failure of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove to form a Government was, too, not a political crisis, but a party one. The normal machinery of parliamentary Government would have continued to function; it did not require May to save it.
In allowing herself to be swept along in a narrative of crisis, May took what was in retrospect a fateful step. It was the first stage in the long and gradual delegitimisation of the referendum result, something that has never been resolved. The May leadership invited the victors in a national vote to accept that their project had already failed. It treated their victory not as a mandate, but as a problem to be solved. But Britain’s democratic system did not need a caretaker, and by insisting otherwise May ended up doing it great damage. Democracy and unity are in many ways opposites; Mayite conscientiousness glorified the latter and weakened the former at a critical moment. We can only conclude that the British people were ill-served by Theresa May’s famous sense of duty, and that she should have inflicted it on someone else. Brexit was the making of May; it would eventually unmake her – but in the meantime she would redefine British politics for a generation.
Continued in Part II
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.