It was a masterclass in being Theresa May. A press conference in which she only revealed her own inadequacy. Her inarticulacy almost total; 15 minutes in which the normal laws of syntax broke down, a public humiliation made all the more excruciating by the lead actor’s almost total lack of self-awareness. Only the hunched shoulders and furtive glances betrayed a primal sense of danger. Her words just words, randomly generated, speaking a different language from her body, a mind body split made in a Cartesian heaven.
My name is Theresa May and I’m... She paused, unsure of quite what she was. She checked her notes. That was it, she was the prime minister, even though it had been months – if not years – since she had shown any signs of leadership. But out in the UK badlands, she’d learned that you get what you can get.
So we were lumbered with her. For the time being at least. Not that she’d be going quietly: they’d have to come mob-handed to get her out of Downing Street. After all, once Brexit was sorted she still had a domestic agenda to pursue. Yes, she really did hate her country that much.
Showing no signs of remorse at having hijacked the first ever meeting of EU and Middle Eastern leaders in Sharm el-Sheikh to talk about Brexit, May blundered on. She’d had some constructive discussions with Donald Tusk, Jean-Claude Juncker and a few others in which absolutely nothing constructive had been discussed. Or to be more accurate, various people had offered her a way out by way of an extension to article 50 but she had just clamped her hands over her ears and said no.
“A delay is a delay,” May said gnomically in answer to questions about why she was so reluctant to consider any possible alternative to taking Brexit down to the wire and forcing MPs to either accept her deal that had been already overwhelmingly rejected or end up with something – either a no deal or delayed Brexit – they might like even less. This was the new mantra. Brexit means Brexit. Delay means delay. Anything means nothing. Nothing means anything. A bad deal is better than a no deal.
It was logic that would have insulted a five-year old, but still the prime minister persisted. By now she was on full Maybot, as so often, both there and not there. A mechanical presence, spewing automated responses to entirely different questions from the ones she had been asked. There was plenty of time to get Brexit done by 29 March. Hell, there were more than 30 days, so why all the panic? Brexit was within her grasp. It was within the country’s grasp. Aka, still bewilderingly out of reach.
That was a high point. From Maybot, her plan descended into terrifying Dr Strangelove: bomb, bomb, bombety bomb. Here was the plan: rather than agreeing a deal with the EU and then trying to get it through parliament, she was going to do the precise opposite. Instead, she was going to come up with whatever deal she could finesse past the European Research Group in her own party and then present it to the EU as a fait accompli.
For the first time, May allowed herself a smile. She couldn’t understand why no one else had thought of this. Negotiating international treaties was so much easier when you didn’t have to negotiate with other countries. Rather you just dreamed up your fantasy scenarios and then told Johnny Foreigner what was going to happen to him. The Hun could be forced to give us their BMWs for next to nothing and in return we’d give them Mark Francois and Boris Johnson. The ideal swap. And if that went well, we might even consider annexing the Sudetenland. It had been at least 80 years since anyone had tried that.
One reporter made a final attempt to drag May back to an approximation of reality. Could he just get her to focus on Wednesday? Would she be sacking any ministers who voted for the Cooper-Letwin amendment? The prime minister just gave a blank death stare. Wednesday might never happen. Today might not even be Monday. Tuesday might just be a repeat of Sunday. That noise? The sound of one can kicking.
Time and space were merely arbitrary constructs, different ways of measuring eternity. You couldn’t run down an imaginary clock that had no past, and no future. All that was clear was that we reaching the end of time. And as with any May press conference, that moment couldn’t come soon enough.
