There can’t be anyone who hasn’t wondered at some point in the last year why the prime minister still bothers. After all, it can’t be much fun to know that almost everyone thinks you’re doing a bad job of implementing a policy in which you don’t even believe. Then there’s the suspense. Every weekend you read stories in the Sunday papers about how your party hates you and your MPs are about to mount a challenge to your leadership, only to find that nothing ever materialises. That level of stress would get to anyone.
But then along comes prime minister’s questions and all seems momentarily well with the world. Though first she may falter under the lights, she then pinches herself and begins to think that maybe she can do the job after all. Being Theresa May is a piece of political performance art. One that would be impossible in someone with enough insight to realise just how badly she was failing. Most normal people, blessed with her unfortunate ability to mangle words and meaning, would collapse in shame.
What makes May so unique, though, is her capacity to suck the life out of any situation. She is a one-woman black hole from which no one can escape. In the past, she has made the mistake of believing that she had to rise to the occasion to win hearts and minds. To inject passion and variety into her monotone in order to give the impression she cared. And every time she crashed and burned. Now she has come to realise that the secret of her success lies in her very mediocrity. In falling to the occasion, she drags everyone down to her level and reminds her party there is no one better qualified to do a bad job badly.
Jeremy Corbyn had gone into PMQs with the best of intentions. To take on May’s claims that austerity was over ahead of next week’s budget. But after the prime minister had failed to answer his direct question by merely insisting that the country’s best days lay ahead – rather giving away the game that things were fairly rubbish now – he lost the will to live. Instead of forensically dismantling the very obvious flaws in May’s arguments, he got lost in a bloodless spat over statistics. No one is better at talking at cross purposes than May.
There was a brief moment when the Labour leader showed he could think on his feet. “Only one party costed its manifesto in the last election, and it was not the Tory party,” he said, in response to May quoting from a book edited by John McDonnell about Labour’s spending promises. It would have been even better if he had been able to point out that she had actually misquoted the relevant passage, but that would have also required him to have read the book. Instead we were treated to Corbyn and May using PMQs to argue about a book neither of them had read. A metaphor for futility.
Long before the two leaders had finished their exchanges, many MPs had already drifted off to lunch. There had been no urgency, no moments of high drama. All that had been revealed was what had already been known. That at a time when the country was facing its greatest existential threat since the second world war, the two main parties were being lead by two narcoleptics, dosing themselves with ever larger quantities of barbiturates as they happily sleepwalked to disaster.
The sense of despair was contagious. It was as if everyone had given up on the idea of May ever answering a question directly or truthfully. So they by and large gave up or merely went through the motions. Conservative Richard Graham became so confused in his attempts to reboot the prime minister’s artificial intelligence that he insisted austerity must be over because a new homelessness shelter had been built in his constituency. Happy days are here again. Just see how excited he gets when some new food banks are opened. Bizarrely, May’s inarticulacy now appears to be a communicable disease.
Not that the prime minister was bothered. She had achieved what she had set out to. When every minute counts, she had survived another hour. Next up, the 1922 committee. And she would survive that too. The hours would turn into days, would turn into weeks, would turn into months, would turn into years. Her failure was her success. Simply by flatlining she would outlast them all.
