Even before Theresa May committed her first outrage in office – the resurrection of Boris Johnson – the feminist response to her victory was strikingly tepid. You would hardly have guessed, from the fast-multiplying caveats, that this is only the second woman in Downing Street and her arrival a symbolic rebuke to a predecessor who spent most of his tenure not giving women jobs.
Women prime ministers are not so commonplace, surely, that one can reasonably dismiss the new arrival for not being as fabulous, to pick a name at random, as Emily Thornberry or for being too much like Margaret Thatcher. There must be a limit to the number of female Tory leaders who can be formally unsexed, like Thatcher, so as to stop their success reflecting so badly on the astonishing marginalising of women in Britain’s progressive parties. It’s not disloyal to Labour, if a bit hurtful given its record, to cheer Theresa May.
True, May’s arrival does not cancel the Tory record on sex discrimination, nor does her reshuffle constitute any useful commitment to equality. Only last week, the party’s pet fertility symbol Andrea Leadsom, worshipped by all its leading creeps, wanted to scrap maternity pay. It could, terrifyingly, have been Leadsom standing there instead. But in some ways, not being invested in her politics made May’s virtually overnight installation even more delicious, notably when she trashed her predecessor in terms that could have been uttered by a pre-Corbyn Labour leader – if Labour women were allowed to become leaders.
The whole spectacle seemed unimprovable – until May refused to kiss her husband for the photographers, on the doorstep where male prime ministers since Tony Blair have PDA’d a submissive helpmeet.
Rarely, in my admittedly limited experience of fandom, has euphoria turned so quickly to disenchantment. There was barely an hour between May’s superb non-kiss in Downing Street and the miracle of Boris Johnson. As a friend texted: “Oh fuck.” No wonder May is considered unreadable. Was it possible, given this haste, that the thing really going through her mind, as she directly addressed struggling working-class families, was how quickly she could summon the destroyer of their prospects from his exile in Islington, now that the city’s rush hour was under way?
Would it be quicker – “We won’t entrench the advantages of the fortunate few” – if the Etonian came by bike?
While others had to wait overnight for their orders, Johnson could not be left, even for another 10 minutes to worry about his future in the country he has, for wholly base reasons, demolished. Did Mrs May even, in her hurry to insult the entire world, ask Johnson to sacrifice his weekly newspaper column, in which he recently commended Putin for reaching out to Assad? Will she allow Johnson leisure, between reminding former parts of the British empire on what they have lost and advertising the racial heritage of the US president, to supplement his earnings with belle-lettrism, currently concerning the unignorable similarities between William Shakespeare and himself?
Mrs May’s fangirls have been left to reflect on recent advice from feminists, such as Sophie Walker of the Women’s Equality party, not to applaud too loudly when a rightwing woman becomes prime minister. Even if, like May, she has not only espoused a range of women’s causes, but modelled a “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like” T-shirt. “We have lacked real female political leadership for so long,” Walker objected, in an article called Female, but not Feminist that “we have come to rely on tropes and symbols to signal a position. These shortcuts aren’t enough.”
Possibly because I hail from the same, benighted era as Mrs May, I am more inclined to applaud her achievements, regardless of her T-shirt, since she first encountered the world of the Bullingdon Club. A year ahead of me, at the same university, her union interests would then have featured quantities of male, entitled, public-school product, much of it in the Cameron mould, yet more of it dimwitted to a fabulous degree that would, however, in the more hereditary professions, prove no obstacle to promotion. As a grammar school girl, she would have merited an extra helping of manly condescension, spiked with pretend awe at her ambition.
At work, in a job that was then, for the most part, men only, she will have been complimented, by men much stupider than her, on being “bright”. If she became known as a “bloody difficult woman”, or renowned for her “icy” affability-deficit, it is probably because she failed to respond delightedly to the above. Not having children, she was often assumed, as we know, to have bought her ascent tragically, with some sort of unwomanly sacrifice or bargain. Latterly, as her career and responsibilities flourished, May found herself, again, surrounded by young alumni of the Bullingdon Club, specifically of the type that tells older women to “calm down, dear”, and younger ones that their 15% representation in the cabinet is no indicator of prejudice.
There may be nothing feminist about it, but almost the best part of watching the May-Eton match was the thought of her, for all those years, quietly observing the all-male fortunate few, starring Cameron, Clegg, Osborne, Boles, Vaizey, Letwin and Gove, whose allegedly massive brain was matched only by his Wagnerian-scale expenses. Mrs May emerged frugally, honour intact, from the 2009 scandal. What did she think, when Cameron appointed and enriched a clique of male friends and donors, sought advice from Philip Green, or put that fool Etonian, Letwin, in charge of the impossibly complex Brexit negotiations? We can surmise, following her speech and reshuffle, that she thought exactly the same as many of us and kept it to herself.
It’s this evidence of a long, contained game that offers some hope that May, by neutralising Johnson’s fan base, intends to get more out of this dismal arrangement than is obvious. Even so, his appointment leaves one last Buller man in the cabinet and swaggering round the embassies, specifically a lying Buller, a priapic Buller (specialist in something called “amitié amoureuse”), a cowardly Buller (though willing to collude in GBH), appointed by a woman who once took a stand against “nasty”. But to allow Johnson to taint a landmark for women would be to endow him with yet more undeserved significance and, possibly, to underestimate Mrs May again.
Machiavelli, in his advice to new princes, notes how the initially most suspect servants may ultimately prove most loyal, “inasmuch as they know it to be very necessary for them to cancel by deeds the bad impression which he had formed of them”. Bearing in mind, of course, that Johnson’s notorious flakiness may make such service impossible. There could, surprisingly soon, be one cricket match too many.
It is some comfort, meanwhile, following May’s dry comments about nearly new water cannons, and Amber Rudd’s allusion to his sleazebaggery, to picture the reception awaiting Johnson’s bluster, Latinisms and rugger talk in a cabinet freshly purged of chair-smashers.
