May at 10 by Anthony Seldon review – an ‘iron lady’ buckling in the heat of power
A Tory prime minister with a stonking lead in the polls engineers an election pledging to get Brexit done and is up against an opposition leader so unpopular that many Labour candidates won’t put his face on their leaflets. What could possibly go wrong?
Anthony Seldon chooses The Pivot as the title of his chapter on the 2017 election. Theresa May’s premiership was one of two parts, separated by that disastrous campaign. Before it, she was empress of all she surveyed. The cabinet was cowed; the civil service bowed. Fawning elements of the media drooled that she was Boudicca reborn and Maggie the Second. After the election announcement, she was greeted by a room of Tory MPs chanting: “Five more years!” The dolts. After the humiliating debacle that cost them seats, she was the empress with no clothes. The May premiership became a tortured and doomed quest to get a Brexit deal through a Commons in which she had no majority. The journey ended with her ignominious eviction from No 10 by the same people who had grovelled at her kitten heels when she was in her pomp.
Yet Seldon draws a paradox from his absorbing and revelatory account of her time in Downing Street. He concludes that she was a much improved prime minister by the end and even allows himself the speculation that she might have had a premiership the length of Blair or Thatcher had she not screwed up that election.
In explaining why she floundered so badly, he makes the excellent point that she was the first prime minister of modern times to become such with no experience as either leader of the opposition or chancellor, the two frontline roles other than prime minister that demand high performative skills and a grasp of policy across the range. Her apprenticeship was six years at the Home Office, a department with onerous responsibilities, but a narrow perspective. It was also a place where she could conceal her pronounced flaws behind the steely mask she wore for the world.
When she moved up to No 10, her aides projected her as “strong and stable” not because she was, but because they were trying to prevent her exposure as a highly insecure and often wobbly woman. We learn that her knees were knocking after her first prime minister’s questions. One aide recalls “her hand shaking on her folder” as she agonised over whether or not to call the fateful election.
Behind closed doors, fists were banged on desks, rows became expletive-laden and there were tears, quite a lot of tears
She was a shy and inflexible introvert in a job that requires a supple capacity to develop relationships both with voters and other political actors. Angela Merkel was the only foreign leader with whom she forged any kind of connection and even then she got little return from it in the Brexit negotiations. May’s inability to trust anyone outside her own tight circle meant she was awful at building alliances with senior colleagues. Seldon is told by one official: “She was the least collegiate prime minister I ever worked with, worse even than Gordon Brown because she was not as bright and lacked his intelligence and vision.”
She and Philip Hammond, another vinegary character, loathed each other. “Theresa, that’s not how it works,” the chancellor would say patronisingly. It turned sour almost instantly and became the most toxic relationship between prime minister and chancellor in many decades, worse even than that between Blair and Brown, and without any of the compensating successes of that duo. There’s a great anecdote about May and Hammond attending the Davos forum in the Swiss Alps. May is helicoptered off the mountains to the airport for the journey home and finds that her jet has gone missing. “Where’s my plane?” she demands and is told by the RAF officer in charge that the chancellor has taken it. “She went absolutely crazy,” reports one witness. “Her whole body contorted in anger and indignation.”
Under pressure, she had a tendency to retreat from everyone except her husband, Philip, into a “bunker of two”. The election campaign started to unravel when her social care policy, quickly tagged a “dementia tax”, came under ferocious attack. She could have mounted a confident defence or conducted an elegant retreat. She did neither, instead disappearing to her home in Maidenhead and going incommunicado as the storm raged around flailing and divided aides. Having signed off on a campaign entirely designed around her, when it started to fall apart she became “surly and miserable” and petulantly complained: “I don’t want it to be about me.”
She knew little about Europe when she came to office, but lacked the intellectual self-confidence to seek out advice beyond her tiny troupe of trusties, a fatal handicap when it came to formulating a workable strategy for Brexit. She was increasingly ridiculed for the robotic nature of her public performances. Behind closed doors, fists were banged on desks, rows became expletive-laden and there were tears, quite a lot of tears. Then again, there was quite a lot to cry about.
Seldon, a fair-minded man who always strives to find some virtues in every prime minister that he studies, argues that May did advance parts of her domestic agenda, dealt with Donald Trump as well as anyone could, and “might well have become a reasonably good, if unspectacular, prime minister” had it not been for Brexit. He acquits her of some of the worst charges that have been levelled against her. The maladroit response to the Grenfell inferno, when she initially failed to meet any of its victims, was not an example of cold indifference to the suffering of others. Her security told her she couldn’t visit the site of the disaster because it would trigger a riot. She later spent considerable time with Grenfell survivors and kept drawings by the Grenfell children in her office to the end of her days at No 10.
Had she been able to display more empathy and emotional intelligence in public, she might have been a more successful prime minister. Then again, probably not. She had a tireless work ethic, a keen eye for detail and was driven by duty as well as ambition, but she was woefully short of many of the other skills required to prosper at the very top.
Authoritative and insightful, this work adds to the already formidable canon of the prolific Seldon, author of more than 40 books. He and his battalion of researchers had just six months to produce this account of a complex premiership and yet the clear prose never reads as if written in a slapdash hurry. Though there doesn’t seem to have been much, if any, cooperation from May herself, the book draws on interviews with many of the key players. It also exploits to excellent effect Seldon’s contacts within the civil service and his capacity to get senior officials to talk frankly. If you want to know who did what when and why, this book will tell you. Seldon excels at piecing together how critical decisions came to be made before coming to well-reasoned judgments about their wisdom and impact.
A very different character, a man that May thought “morally unfit” to be prime minister, is now hoping to succeed where she failed. I look forward to Johnson at 10, though it is impossible at this moment to know whether that will be another big book or a very short one.
• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
• May at 10 by Anthony Seldon is published by Biteback (£25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
