The Westminster-bubble can be generous when someone no longer matters.
The overall verdict is woeful but Theresa May’s impending departure has already produced what many retirements do, a political farewell which pays her insincere honour. But May has been such a disaster that the least praise stretches credulity. The struggle to produce kind words has left some reduced to admiring that she never talks about her Type 1 diabetes.
Long ago her stubbornness, doggedly interpreted in the name of fairness as resilience and stamina, stopped attracting the feeblest of praise. Inability to think on her feet in the House of Commons and apparent total absence of self-awareness visibly took a toll on the few loyal colleagues. After those sessions flanking her on the front bench Philip Hammond and David Lidington must have gained an inch or so in height as her exit approaches.
Dispraise in truth must start back in her time as home secretary, with the programme of creating a ‘hostile environment’ to drive down immigration figures, those vans driven round London with their sinister message: ‘In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest’.
From this vantage point, in the part of the UK whose interests she judged entirely in the light of maintaining a parliamentary majority, humbug about May sticks in the throat as humbugs are liable to do. There is sound and lasting reason here to put a big red scrawl across her name, even if it is minor compared to the callousness and cruelty of the injustice to the Windrush generation and its descendants. But May treated this part of her ‘precious union’ in short-sighted, partisan, entirely selfish fashion.
Faced with that scrabble for votes thanks largely to her own poor judgment, she could have done things differently. That was the moment to choose a cross-party approach, an attempt to build an alliance in Westminster that could sustain a withdrawal agreement with the EU. Instead she played to the Brexiters, turned her face away from the narrowly outpolled Remainers, and clutched the DUP to her. She let their ten votes seal her into wooing people almost all long recognised at Westminster as impossible, cranks.
But then Cameron let the same Tory sub-set jockey him into a referendum, in the process loosing them upon his and May’s party and, possibly, on the fabric of her ‘precious union.’
Instead of holding to British commitment to the Good Friday Agreement and its laboriously constructed level playing-field, May did what Cameron did, only more so. His disdain for the even-handedness required of British governments by the GFA, compounded by weirdly inappropriate advice, led him to shack up with the Ulster Unionist fake rebrand as UCUNF.
That naked identification of prime minister with an Northern Ireland unionist party was a slap at any expectation that the field of play would stay level. In her dependence on the DUP May crashed through what optimism remained. Where Cameron’s record at least includes his Bloody Sunday apology, May’s will remain linked to Arlene Foster, Nigel Dodds, Sammy Wilson, Ian Paisley.
In these last days in office she has been pathetically trying to retrofit herself with a decent legacy. In her last major speech on Saturday she had the nerve to lecture about populism, a message some thought she should have addressed to herself.
Sky political correspondent Lewis Goodall recalled her bilious ‘If you believe you're a citizen of the world, you're a citizen of nowhere. You don't understand what the very word 'citizenship' means’. In finding ‘enemies repeatedly within the British political system; the courts, the media, parliament itself’ May had fed people’s belief, he said, that Westminster elites and parliament were seeking to betray the public; their prime minister told them so.
She may have found them dislikeable allies, but that sense of victimhood is pure DUP. Only what comes next can throw any sort of rosy glow backwards on Theresa May.
