A YEAR after she took office, we picture Theresa May in happier times running through a field of wheat, her high heels discarded, her owl’s-beak nose lifted high to inhale the bracing fresh air as she bounds through breeze-blown stalks … and falls down a muddy hole.
Poor Theresa. Today, she creaks along jerkily like a cranky cartoon character from a Tim Burton film, while groups of suits conspire against her, casting malevolent glances at the gauche leaderene fiddling nervously with the cuffs of her arguably fashionable blouse.
Rarely has a prime ministerial career gone wrong so speedily. Gordie Broon’s was pretty fast, but everyone thought him a poltroon from day one. Theresa had been greeted initially as the sensible alternative to manifest shysters Michael Gove and Boris Johnson.
True, she has already outlasted Baron Home of the Hirsel (Eck Douglas-Home) and, if she lasts till next Easter, she’ll have done better than Sir Anthony Eden. But these are prehistoric political figures, at least one of whom had a moustache. Today, we expect stability, which is what Mrs May promised, along with strength, in an endlessly repeated mantra which in the end earned only titters.
She is, as they say, in office but not in power. The lights at Downing Street are on, but nobody is in. Somewhere on a mythical plane, her head is bowed as a single horse-hair strains to hold the chib of Damocles dangling above her neck.
Like most political aspirants, she had a brass neck standing for high office in the first place. Where do they get that misplaced confidence? True, you can grow into the role. But she started growing out of it from day one.
Her tenure has been a tragi-comedy of errors. The nation’s first suspicions were aroused when she was filmed holding hands with, er, distinctive American President Donald Trump, like two schoolkids in the playground. That was obviously The Donald’s idea and, unlike Melania on occasion, Theresa didn’t pooh-pooh it. It has long been an axiom of political life that a strong leader must know when to pooh-pooh.
Again, meeting foreign leaders, this time in yonder Europe, she stood shunned and alone as mellow Continental types hugged and even kissed each other. Their louche bonhomie chilled uptight British viewers to the bone.
Where Margaret Thatcher would have brought order to this touch-feely rabble, breenging in and batting bravely for Britain, Theresa just stood there, hapless and awkward, like a lonely sausage roll on a heaving table of Mediterranean cuisine.
Not that it mattered. Some Britlanders even felt strangely proud of her, as they’d have done just the same. Who wants to be pals with sweaty garlic-sookers anyway?
All the same, an odour of foreboding had begun to hang about Theresa. Nose-pegs on beaks, the voters might still have tholed her. But hubris took hold of the vicar’s daughter and, thinking herself invincible, she called a General Election – and botched it spectacularly.
Robotically repeating arid soundbites to hand-picked cadres in brutally detoxified locations, she failed to connect with voters, unlike her principal opponent, who sloughed off his image as an ineffectual Maoist in a geography teacher’s jaicket and ripped his shirt apart to reveal Super-Jeremy, man of principle.
Faced with a man who knew what he wanted, Theresa concocted a fantastical desire of her own: fox-hunting. And, lo, the masses shrank back further. Setting mutts to mangle beasts for fun hardly appealed to “the people”, who saw it as a sop to rural supremacists and urban stockbrokers role-playing Squire Dungfondler for the day.
Later, it became another U-turn, joining the so-called dementia tax, grammar schools and the snatching of free lunches from primary school kids. Theresa’s injudicious electoral gamble saw her lose her Commons majority and being forced into a deal with the Democratic Unionist Party, which wants the death penalty for sodomy with dinosaurs.
As if that weren’t Cretaceous enough, we haven’t even touched on Brexit, a bags of which is being made even as we speak. Yesterday, as the Great Repeal Bill came before the Commons, the unlikely figure of Sir Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, was reported criticising Mrs May’s administration for failing to show “active and energetic” leadership over Brexit, which he warned could come apart “like a chocolate orange”.
With these remarks melting in her mooth, Mrs May might at best splutter that, like those for whom she once aspired to speak, she is “just about managing”. Yesterday, she indicated that she might serve a few more years, but might also succumb to the will of her disaffected party. So we are ruled by Theresa Maybe, who once ran through the fields, but now sits in the mud.
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