Secrecy, Suspicion and Stumbles Catch Up With Theresa May
Theresa May was dealt a poor hand when she became prime minister, and proceeded to play it very badly.
(Bloomberg) --
Theresa May was dealt a poor hand when she became prime minister, and proceeded to play it very badly.
Perhaps no leader in 2016 could have satisfied British expectations of Brexit. Advocates of leaving the European Union had made many promises about the benefits, and been deliberately vague on the details. But May’s approach of taking decisions in a tight circle left her without allies when the going got rough – both at home and in European capitals.
May had been prime minister for 18 months before she allowed her Cabinet to discuss what kind of relationship the U.K. should have with the EU after it had left. This was eight months into the two-year negotiating period, and long after May had laid out a series of contradictory red lines. It was no surprise that few members of her government felt obliged to defend her decisions.
Likewise, May refused to make Brexit, the biggest foreign and economic policy decision the country has faced in decades, a cross-party effort. She alienated rank and file members of her own Conservatives, dismissed opponents as anti-Brexit and put Scotland’s nationalists back on a war footing for independence.
Only Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, who were propping up her Conservatives in power, were consulted. Even they complained of being frozen out of key decisions. When May realized she would need more votes to get her Brexit deal through Parliament, it was too late to look for them.
A snap general election in 2017 had exposed her shortcomings as a political campaigner and left her with neither authority within her party nor a majority in parliament. From that point, she stayed in place only because her Conservative Party was unable to agree how to replace her.
The final weeks before she was forced out replayed the mistakes of her premiership at great speed. With parliament deadlocked and suspicious, ministers would promise something, only to find the prime minister apparently contradicting them. First a no-deal Brexit was off the table, then it was a likely option, then it was off the table again. The only sure thing was that the EU was adamant negotiations were over.
She opened talks with the opposition Labour Party, but her three years of making Brexit a party political issue meant that neither side had much room to compromise.
After so many disastrous moments, it’s hard to choose a point where it became clear that May, 62, was doomed.
For many members of parliament, it was a televised statement in March after being forced to delay Brexit. She blamed them for the government’s problems, and pitched herself as the ally of the angry public against intransigent politicians. MPs, already on the receiving end of death threats, were furious.
“When Theresa stood for leader, she made a virtue of the fact that she wasn’t clubbable, that she would take decisions slowly after listening and consulting widely,” said Will Tanner, who had been an aide to May in her previous job as Home Secretary and moved with her to Downing Street. “Three years later, that lack of clubbability was seen as a massive weakness, and the deliberative approach was indecision.”
In June 2016, as the U.K. voted by 52 to 48 percent for Brexit, May had seemed like the only adult in the room. Her predecessor, David Cameron, had spent six years governing in a laid-back manner, surrounded by friends from his days at Eton and Oxford. Now his project was in ruins, destroyed by a referendum he’d called without foreseeing the danger.
In the leadership contest that followed, May sold herself as the anti-Cameron, a woman in the mold of Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister venerated by Conservatives.
May was the daughter of a Church of England minister. She owed her position to hard work, rather than contacts. She had spent six years as home secretary, dealing with terrorists and riots. Her record included a willingness to confront people with hard truths, once telling her fellow Tories that they were seen as “the nasty party,” and the police that they were complacent about the deep problems in their own ranks.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Conservative Party was blowing itself up. The leadership candidates who had supported Brexit knifed each other and then themselves. Even before her final opponent dropped out of the race, May had the overwhelming support of her MPs.
When she took office, May interpreted the vote for Brexit as a cry of frustration with the wider political class. She had advocated remaining in the EU, though vowed to deliver on the result. She promised to govern for voters beyond London, the people she characterized as “just about managing.” It was a bold play to break Labour’s dominance in its post-industrial heartlands, many of which had embraced leaving the EU.
“Her speech in Downing Street was really good,” said Damian Green, one of her closest Cabinet colleagues until 2017. “It set out a humane, modern Conservatism, which was exactly what I believe in. It’s a genuine tragedy that we’ve never been able to implement that.”
For the next 10 months, May and her tiny group of trusted aides had a complete grip on government. And with that centralized power came political misjudgments.
In one speech she argued that “if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.” It was intended as an attack on ultra-rich tax avoiders, and was instead taken as an insult to the nearly half the country that had voted against Brexit. May, conscious that she had been on the losing side of the referendum, seemed determined to compensate with her enthusiasm for leaving the EU.
But as announcements were held up in May’s office, Conservative MPs came up with a new nickname for their leader: “Theresa Maybe.” In particular, it was impossible to divine what sort of Brexit she wanted.
May had appointed some of the leading advocates of leaving the EU to key government jobs: Boris Johnson as foreign secretary and David Davis as Brexit secretary. Johnson found himself excluded from discussions about Brexit policy, and Davis proved easy to sideline.
“She finds politicians and journalists untrustworthy,” said Green, who has known her since Oxford University days. “She never cultivated the media. She never cultivated colleagues.”
Instead of engaging Parliament and the country in a discussion about the inevitable trade-offs Brexit would require, May answered all questions with a mantra of “Brexit means Brexit, and we will make a success of it.” Anti-Europeans in her party were delighted when she announced that “no deal is better than a bad deal.”
The refusal to publicly engage with the complexities of Brexit had the short-term pay-off of allowing almost everyone in her party to believe that she could be persuaded to back their vision. The long-term result, though, was that no one was prepared for the compromises May would ultimately have to make.
If doubts about May within her party were rising gradually, the collapse of her authority came suddenly, at 10 p.m. on June 8, 2017. The exit poll for the snap election that she’d called revealed that, far from increasing her majority and strengthening her Brexit hand, she had lost it altogether. At Conservative headquarters as the news came in, there was silence. It was as though the air had been sucked out of the room.
May had called the election for good reasons. She believed, probably correctly, that the small majority she’d inherited from Cameron wouldn’t be enough to get difficult legislation through Parliament. And the polls told her she had a huge lead over the Labour Party under leader Jeremy Corbyn.
She was undone, again, by secrecy. Labour had concluded months earlier that a general election was likely. It had plans in place. But May’s team, fearing a leak, had made few plans. While Labour candidates immediately began printing and distributing leaflets, the Conservatives were stalled. The prime minister launched a surprise attack – and the main people surprised were her own forces.
Worse, May had for months vehemently denied planning an election, meaning that the first thing she did in the campaign was break her word. For Tanner, the former aide, this was a terrible mistake. “Before that point, Theresa was a unifying national leader,” he said. “At that moment she became a partisan figure. Her fundamental brand was damaged by the act. She’d said so many times that she wasn’t going to.”
The Tories had given little thought to what kind of campaign they would fight. Indeed, May’s Cabinet only learned about key pledges, affecting their own departments, hours before they were announced. It was too late to point out problems.
One policy in particular proved horrifically unpopular. A complicated plan to reconfigure the way care for the elderly was funded was quickly branded a “dementia tax” by opponents. Tory candidates found themselves accused to wanting to take away pensioners’ houses. Unaware of the details of the policy themselves, they couldn’t defend it. Within days, the Conservatives decided to drop their flagship policy.
It was here that the campaign found May out. Her stiff delivery, and adherence to scripted lines, had already earned her the nickname “Maybot.” Corbyn, meanwhile, proved an enthusiastic and affable campaigner, who related well to voters.
It seemed impossible to imagine, in the hours after the shock election result, that May could last as prime minister. She was saved by the reluctance of any internal opponents to wield the knife. Tories said privately that they might as well let her take the pain of delivering Brexit.
For the next two years, the government found itself stymied and May’s weaknesses continued to be exposed.
The EU remained largely supportive, if nothing else because they considered her a more moderate prime minister that many of her potential rivals. But European leaders complained that she stuck to her rehearsed lines in private as much as she did in public. Much of the detail of negotiation was left to officials.
Her performance in successive European summits and broken promises over how she would get her deal through Parliament saw her reputation nose-dive and led to a complete breakdown in trust.
Davis and Johnson, whom she’d brought into her Cabinet to show that she was serious about Brexit, were pushed aside. She didn’t trust her colleagues, and they didn’t trust her.
“The thread is secrecy,” said Green. “She always relied on a close-knit team, and that’s the tone she brought to Number 10. But the Cabinet was untrustworthy. I would sit in Cabinet and watch colleagues take detailed notes of the meeting which I would then read on Twitter.”
In Parliament, Conservative anti-Europeans were becoming increasingly concerned. Their caucus, the European Research Group, became a party within the party. It threatened to block Brexit moves it didn’t agree with, and remove May if she didn’t do what it wanted.
But each time May gave the ERG a concession, other Conservatives worried she was taking Britain towards an economically disruptive break from the EU. Ultimately, they too revolted, with Cabinet ministers disobeying voting instructions, and daring May to sack them.
“Leaders need to lead, but followers need to follow,” Green said. “We’ve been in a period where frankly nobody could lead the Tory Party.”
Instead of engagement with her own side, and even with Labour MPs who were sympathetic to Brexit, May kept her intentions a mystery well into 2018. Her occasional set-piece speeches were pored over for hints of her intentions. But they were sufficiently elliptical that both Brexit hard-liners and those who wanted a closer relationship with the EU could welcome them.
It wasn’t until the middle of last year that her plan finally became clear. In a day-long summit at her country residence, May set out to her Cabinet a plan to ask the EU for a close relationship, staying aligned to its rules. Two days later, her Brexit Secretary, Davis, resigned in protest. Within hours, Johnson followed.
Despite a series of increasingly tight votes, May still believed she could get a deal through Parliament. A new Brexit Secretary, Dominic Raab, took a more aggressive approach to negotiations with the EU. But when May announced her final deal with the EU in November, he too quit, again complaining of being sidelined.
That deal prompted the first attempt by Tory MPs to throw May overboard, with a confidence vote against her. She survived it, but 117 Conservatives – more than a third of the party – voted against her. It was obvious then, if it hadn’t been before, that there was no route for her deal through Parliament. Equally, there was no other solution available.
“Theresa isn’t a tactician or a strategist,” said Tanner. “She thinks less about how other people are going to respond to what she does. She doesn’t enjoy the salesman part of the role.”
Instead, she called on Parliament to act in the national interest. The problem, to which May never seemed to reconcile herself, was that other politicians disagreed with her about what the national interest was.
She spent 2019 at the mercy of MPs. Long periods of inactivity in Parliament were interrupted by intense cycles of votes in which every option would be rejected. Conservatives would offer alternative plans, each of which boiled down to asking the EU for a different deal. Those who hoped to take over from her willed her to solve Brexit, but couldn’t suggest how – or willed someone to oust her without doing it themselves.
The EU watched in frustration. In March, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, one of her closest allies, likened her to the knight in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” who loses his arms and legs in a fight and asks to call it a draw.
In the end, it was the failure to heal the wounds of the divisive referendum that brought her down and how history will judge her. To Green and Tanner, who had helped to get her to the top of British politics, it was a tragedy in which her strengths came to be seen as flaws.
--With assistance from Ian Wishart.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tim Ross at tross54@bloomberg.net, Rodney Jefferson
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