I finally feel sorry for Theresa May – she doesn't deserve this psychological torture and should be allowed to step down
Are you starting to feel sorry for her yet?
It’s taken a long time for me. But as her political living death drags on and her humiliation heightens, shards of human sympathy for Theresa May finally puncture the election-fiasco schadenfreude.
In the months since the exit poll ended her career, seconds after 10pm on 8 June, her corpse has been propped up by those who believe it is to their advantage to pretend she is alive.
Both sides of the Tory Brexit divide have welded the same strategy. For now, they are acting out Weekend at Bernie’s, where a dead man’s employees try to protect themselves from the mob by creating the myth that the boss survives. Eventually, they intend to replicate Alan Partridge’s reaction when BBC commissioning chief Chris Feather succumbs to a coronary moments after offering him a juicy contract: Partridge tries to manipulate the cadaver’s hand into signing it.
Melding the two plotlines is the intent of soft and hard Brexiteers. They mean to keep her upright until they can stick a pen in her cold, stiff hand and manoeuvre a posthumous signature to the Brexit deal – if there is a deal.
In recent days, the strategy has crossed the Channel. Last week, it became apparent that Angela Merkel was conspiring with other EU leaders to radiate a falsely optimistic message about progress in talks, purely to keep May’s body on its feet. There is understandable concern that Boris Johnson would be the beneficiary of a funeral.
Yesterday, as most days, Brexit got a little worse for Theresa May. A week after she and David Davis dined with Jean-Claude Juncker in Brussels, it was leaked – apparently by his chief of staff, with Juncker’s consent – that May struck him as “anxious”, “tormented”, “despondent and discouraged”.
That reading was endorsed today by the well-sourced political columnist Rachel Sylvester, who wrote in The Times that May has appeared “stricken and stunned” to recent visitors to her office. After “she sat in silence for almost 10 minutes”, one apparently left believing she no longer wants the job.
Why would she? To want this job at this time, you’d have to be a demented fantasist and a raving narcissist. Perhaps you can picture one of those sat drooling at the Cabinet table like a famished albino wolf (Merkel evidently can). But it isn’t Theresa May.
The stress on her is both unimaginable and constantly intensifying. Today, Juncker wound up her No Deal Ultras by reminding them, a little needlessly, that they have no friends in the European Commission. Also today, Merkel’s reported fury over that leak, though superficially supportive of May, did nothing but illuminate her impotence.
Like a jellyfish, May is washed along by every tide that ebbs and flows. Unlike a jellyfish, she feels the pain. Last week, The Independent reported the assertion that consciousness survives physical death; that when we die, we know we are dead. The resigned misery of a nominal national leader who is reduced to silence while visitors stare at their shoes would seem to support the theory.
This might be a form of psychological torture in which the victim feels she has little choice other than to collude. But little isn’t zero. She does have a choice, and must have a breaking point. Her gauntness and the dark rings beneath her eyes, as outlined in the Juncker dinner leak, suggest that she is close to the latter.
No one sharing a postal code with their right mind would blame her for shirking her duty if she made that choice. No one should endure the humiliation of being kept in a pastiche of power by a fiction sustained by a collective will – albeit for different and opposing motives.
God knows if it really is in anyone’s best interests to keep up this pretence. You’d need the Tardis to take you to March 2019 to know that. But in these distressing circumstances, with a pitiable British Prime Minister verging on the catatonic when entertaining people she has asked to see, the Tardis journey in my mind is from a recent Peter Capaldi episode, in which a colony ship was trying to reverse away from a black hole.
So colossal was this vessel that time moved at vastly different speeds on different decks. At the end nearest the hole, the massive gravitational force was distorting it to super-slow motion. At the other, 400 miles away, it moved at normal pace. So it is with Brexit. In Brussels and throughout Europe, time is fast running out. Here, in stasis, we act as if infinity awaits.
In that same episode, the Doctor’s friend Bill Potts is killed and turned into a Cyberman. But until the tear-jerking conclusion, she had no idea that she had died and become a robot.
However strongly Theresa May resembles a prototype android from the Patrick Troughton-era, and however long ago political rigor mortis set in for her, she is a vulnerable human visibly being pulled apart by the gravitational force of the economic black hole into which No Deal threatens to suck us.
In any reality where time is moving as normal speed, it would be time for her to bury the pretence and rest in peace.
