As she says goodbye, Maybot finally shows her humanity
Practice makes perfect. After four previous attempts that had allowed her rather more wriggle room than the Conservative party had been expecting, Theresa May finally delivered her fifth and definitive resignation speech. Arguably it was the best speech she had ever given as prime minister, one that ended with her choking on her words as she tried to contain her tears. Unlike David Cameron, who called time on his career with a jaunty hum – ‘Di-dum, di-dee, I didn’t do it, it wasn’t me, di-dum, di-dee’ – May really had given a toss all along. It’s just a pity it took her so long to show it.
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Shortly after 10am, May walked out into the Downing Street sunshine to inflict the coup de grace on her time in office. She quickly got to the point. She would be resigning as of 7 June – no one was going to deprive her of a last photo opportunity with Donald Trump – and would step down as prime minister once the Tories had selected a new leader. No ifs, not buts. No more trying to hide inside the fridge at No 10, hoping that her party wouldn’t notice she hadn’t retreated to Maidenhead as promised. No more blanking out her colleagues in pursuit of the undeliverable deal. This was the end. Beautiful friend, the end.
Then came the sting. A hint of defiance. Yes, she might have been one of the worst British prime ministers of the past 200 years, but worse was round the corner. In six months the whole country might beg her to come back. The next prime minister would still have to face the challenge of how to deliver Brexit without bankrupting the UK – and that person could be Boris Johnson, Michael Gove or Andrea Leadsom: three MPs the Tory party rejected three years ago as totally unsuitable to lead the country.
Just imagine Boris as prime minister. A diagnosed narcissist whose entire political career had been constructed through the prism of personal opportunism. A man who as mayor of London had wasted millions of pounds on pointless vanity projects. Who as foreign secretary had insulted the Germans, had contributed to a British national being banged up in Iran and couldn’t even take responsibility for a Chequers’ deal he had signed off. Who had written racist columns in the Telegraph and never even aspired to being a man of principle. The populist’s populist. Both the thinking man’s idiot and the idiot’s thinking man. That was the UK’s future. Good luck with that. She would be well out of it.
Old habits die hard, though. Either that, or she couldn’t resist making time to be her own Maybot tribute act. The defining hallmark of May’s time in office has been her binary view of the world. She has always been right and anyone who has tried to contradict her has been shouted down in a meaningless series of monotone ones and noughts. Brexit means Brexit. Strong and Stable. Nothing has changed. A drone in more ways than one. A woman who could make inanimate objects dissolve into tears of frustration.
“Compromise isn’t a dirty word,” she observed. Self-knowledge has never been her strongest suit. This from a woman to whom the very idea of compromise is anathema. It had been her insistence on her Brexit red lines that had shaped the whole nature of the withdrawal agreement. It had been her playing to the gallery of the hardline Eurosceptics and her refusal to seek consensus with remainers that sent her spiralling out of control. Even when she had reluctantly engaged in cross party talks, her idea of compromise had been to state her position and to expect Labour to fall in line.
Her final plea to be remembered for something other than failing to deliver Brexit fell flat. The best legacy she can realistically expect is to be quickly forgotten, though the country is unlikely to be that forgiving. Her image as the country’s therapist and saviour had never been wholly convincing, ever since she had commissioned the “go home” vans as home secretary.
She tried to run through some of her government’s achievements. She needn’t have bothered. Successes, she’d had a few. But there again, too few to mention. Her subconscious even compelled her to remember Grenfell Tower. Presumably as an act of atonement. On the day after the fire, she had hidden from the survivors.
After little more than seven minutes at the lectern, May croaked out the last couple of sentences. Here it all became too much and her voice caught in her throat. As the words died on her lips, she turned on her heels and rushed for the front door. Fearful she had revealed too much, when her tragedy had been that she had revealed too little.
Was this the real May or was this just fantasy? No one could be quite certain. Not even the Four Pot Plants who thought they had seen it all. If only the Tories had been sensible enough to select them as their leader, all would have been well. Ish. As it was, Brexit had broken May, just as surely as it would break her successor. A three-year term in office that had started from a seemingly impregnable position of strength had ended in masochistic humiliation. But in losing her job, the Maybot had finally displayed her humanity.