I didn’t think there could be an incident involving Theresa May on a stage that was more excruciating than her Maidenhead election night count, standing alongside Lord Buckethead and Elmo, as the night’s events were seared across her face.
I was wrong.
If Boris Johnson apparently likes to think of himself as a roaring lion (he isn’t), then Theresa May was more cat with a furball as she coughed her way through a speech while the walls collapsed around her. Here are just some of the things that went wrong for the prime minister, and some tips for, um, next time:
Set the stage
“Building a country that works for everyone” announced her backdrop. Except it turns out the Conservatives couldn’t even build a sign for everyone, as the letter F dropped from the wall. (Leading many to joke about telling the Tories to “eff off”). Shortly afterwards, the E disappeared – but this is Manchester, the city of rave: Es are dropped a lot. At the end of the speech, one journalist tweeted a picture of what remained of the sign, a few sad letters, like the dregs of Scrabble tiles in the bag. It’s difficult to take the Conservatives’ message seriously when it’s literally disintegrating in real time.
When that letter "F" fell off (the last "E" then fell off later,) pic.twitter.com/ylYYQ8IKTJ
— Daniel Sandford (@BBCDanielS) October 4, 2017
I suppose at least she wasn’t Jeremy Hunt standing in front of this sign.
Don’t be sick
In fairness, it isn’t May’s fault she was ill. She had better hope she perks up, though, because soon we won’t have a publicly funded NHS to speak of, and good luck with getting sickness benefit or, you know, a GP appointment. It might have made more sense after the first splattering of lung pushed its way up the oesophagus to abort the speech or skip straight to the meat of policy. As someone in an already weakened position, the optics were … how should one put this? Not good.
It did, however, mean we got to witness the hilarious moment when May was given a standing ovation for receiving a glass of water from a runner. Because, honestly, that is the level of competence we are operating at at the moment.
The PM losing her voice now - really struggling. #cpc17 pic.twitter.com/7WEC703qM4
— Nick Linford (@NickLinford) October 4, 2017
You could argue that it reflects well on May for ploughing on, but it also meant an excruciating spectacle for the rest of us. Apart from some light relief when the chancellor, Philip Hammond, gave her a lozenge.
I don’t envy May. One of the most traumatic experiences of my life was a coughing fit that lasted throughout a three-hour physics exam, trying to swallow until my eyes almost bled – and I wasn’t trying to sell one of the worst decisions in this country’s history.
Don’t get pranked
It’s sort of incredible how, just weeks after the country’s terror threat was at critical, a prankster – who turned out to be comedian Simon Brodkin – was able to get this close to the prime minister.
Handing her a P45 was a neat trick, but the most absurd thing here was that May TOOK IT. Don’t take it!
Brodkin’s interruption wasn’t the first of the Tory conference – Jacob Rees-Mogg was confronted by a protester. It reminded me of my favourite ever interruption: Rupert Murdoch being hit with a pie during a select committee hearing, if only because it gave us the famous Wendy Deng Right Hook.
Choose your words carefully
At one point, May started talking about the agenda that “burns inside her” which, as many pointed out, sounds a bit like she is suffering from either heartburn or an STI, or both, or just awful speech writing. You cannot be a prime minister as unpopular as May and use such a phrase without getting reactions such as “there’s a cream for that”. That’s just the way it is.
Know your audience
It must be strange giving a speech to a room full of people, knowing that some of them openly resent you and want your job, while others pretend not to resent you and still want your job.
May really could have handled this better. She’s no stranger to putting frenemies in their place – just witness her Spectator speech last year – but here she did well enough just to get the words out; a wounded gazelle just trying to slow the pace of bleeding out. At one point, Amber Rudd, the home secretary even had to admonish the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, telling him to stand up during an ovation. Hammond’s lozenge offer, like some sort of one-man-cough-sweet rapid-response unit, turned her attempted power dynamic with the chancellor on its head. Finally, there were moments when May said “some of you may not have heard that” and repeated lines, simply because they had not been met with a laugh. They heard you all right – they just weren’t responding.
Perhaps the biggest disconnect, however, was May wearing a bracelet which featured the artist Frida Kahlo – that’s Frida Kahlo, the signed-up member of the Mexican Communist party who dated Trotsky. We all have our artistic heroes with different political views to our own – I like Frida Kahlo and I am not a communist and, well, Ezra Pound, anyone? – but maybe don’t raid Etsy for a demonstrative off-message piece of jewellery right before party conference.
This was one bad, cough, awful, cough, speech.
- Hannah Jane Parkinson is a Guardian columnist
