Theresa May’s incurable awkwardness is easily her most redeeming feature – though I admit the field is not especially crowded.
Her inability to dance is now an international source of delight after her brush with Abba as she began her Tory party conference speech on Wednesday. This follows her recent trip to South Africa, where she used movement to convey her emotional state as well as any titan of contemporary dance. Rarely has a person danced looking more like she wishes she were dead, or that the people with cameras were dead, or that – at a push – everyone was dead.
What’s interesting is that May and her press officers seem to have changed direction on her social ineptitude. There is no point trying to pass her off as a normal person when she cannot maintain human responses for more than eight seconds in a row. You either own the awkwardness or dress her in a robot suit and apologise to the nation for ever pretending she was anything else. Or split the difference, as they chose at the party conference: she dresses like a human, dances like a robot, and opens with sentences that have the form of jokes but none of the content.
So May began her speech with a self-deprecating statement in the place where – for another speaker – a joke would have gone. She apologised if she developed a cough, because she’d been up all night supergluing the letters onto the backdrop behind her. You can see how, in a meeting of people who have never knowingly smiled, these twin references to her catastrophic conference speech last year seemed witty and apt (the rest of us had blanked out the 2017 Tory party conference with the help of either therapy or hard liquor).
But even the most stupefied listener might have wondered how the second clause possibly affected the first. Who coughs because they have been up all night doing DIY? No one. You might yawn if you’d been up all night. But you wouldn’t cough. And yet the very hopelessness of this joke is what almost made it work. She has the earnestness of someone who is desperate to land one gag, once in her life, and is untarnished by decades of failure.
There’s no point giving her good material: she’ll just destroy it with her terrible overenunciation. And that is surely what May and her team have realised. If she delivers a recognisable joke, it will still fall flat and everyone will be able to see how she screwed it up. Give her a non-joke and when it dies, no one’s surprised. Of course it died: was it even meant to be a joke? May’s headmistressy manner is far better suited to asking what we’re all sniggering at than pitching a gag.
She was destined to be laughed at rather than with. Embracing that is a better option than wishing it away, or trying to counterbalance it with relaxed body language at which she would also inevitably fail.
Politicians have form for succeeding when they embrace their own oddity, instead of fighting against it. Ask Ed Miliband, who seemed equally robotic as a front bench politician, and then astonished listeners of Radio 2 when he stepped in for Jeremy Vine by being a real, live person: once he wasn’t on the perpetual defensive, he became human. His Reasons to be Cheerful podcast has impressive listener numbers and his Twitter followers are often charmed by his quick, concise wit. He’s still geeky, but by embracing the geekery he has become likeable in a way he struggled to be as leader of the Labour party.
Or ask Ed Balls, who managed to negotiate an economics fellowship at Harvard at the same time as he was Gangnam Styling us into a full national jawdrop on Strictly Come Dancing. Like Miliband, Balls seemed to come alive the moment he could stop being afraid that any unguarded remark might be used against him.
Perhaps once you have been derided for every minor faux pas (eating a sandwich, having a stammer), you eventually lose fear.
The paradox of this, of course, is that high political office keeps these awkward people stressed and weird. Once they retire, they become more relaxed, more human and – crucially – more popular. Balls was probably at his most electable doing the jive: if the nation had gone to the polls that week, he and Katya Jones would be in Downing Street now.
Maybe Theresa May is hoping that some of his dancing glitter will rub off on her.
• Natalie Haynes is a writer, broadcaster and comedian
