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Theresa May's conference speech was a politician's worst nightmare
By GQ freelance political writer 4 October 2017
The political obituaries for Theresa May need to be written now
You have to hope that one day the Mays can look back on today and laugh. It might take a while, though, for the Prime Minister to come to terms with the near-perfect storm of catastrophe that was her speech to Conservative party conference in Manchester.
Theresa May began by apologising for her campaign in the snap general election before beginning to set out a compelling case for her resilience. By the end of the speech she had performed the most extraordinary display of that resilience after getting through a speech that was a torturous ordeal to watch. For May, that speech must have been the sort of event that would have made sitting an A-Level exam naked feel bearable. Theresa May is tough as nails, of that there can be no doubt, but if she began party conference wounded by the snap general election, she ended that speech on life support. By the end, the stage was literally falling apart, and that was far from the worst of it.
Theresa May's political obituaries need to be written now. All successful politicians have to be lucky, and for a while Theresa May had that quality: after maintaining brilliant tactical silence over Brexit, her rise to the top job was fast enough to give observers whiplash. One by one her rivals for the job of Prime Minister self-imploded in an orgy of ambition and incompetence. The contest over, May's popularity and the Labour party's perceived weakness set her up for political domination.
It's hard to remember now, but there was a moment when it looked like the Labour Party was facing near-annihilation at the ballot box. You know what happened next, and Conservative Party conference was in low spirits this week. Today wasn't a "make or break" speech for the PM, it was an attempt to glue the pieces together just to keep the show on the road. If Theresa May was a "dead woman walking" after the general election, she's now the dismembered, crawling undead. May's luck has most definitely run out. First Theresa May has heckled by a man handing her a P45 – a stunt that would have been survivable by itself – but then it got worse. So much worse.
It was like watching a violinist try to perform with three broken strings and a broom handle for a bow
Great politicians develop the Teflon-quality of being able to recover from incidents, but the material on Prime Ministers wears off with use, until everything sticks and each small disaster becomes emblematic of a greater malaise. The metaphors begin to write themselves, and so it was that Theresa May – a woman struggling to be heard above the vainglorious utterances of her foreign secretary - lost her voice on stage. This wasn't a tickle in the back of the throat, this was so bad that even the PM might have been hoping for another breach of security, a power failure, or frankly any excuse to pull stumps on an excruciatingly painful experience for everyone concerned. "When am I going to wake up?" she could have been forgiven for wondering as the audience was forced into long bouts of spontaneous applause just to afford the Prime Minister the chance to sip water, cough, take a lozenge from the chancellor, and wish herself out of existence.
I once skipped an entire year of lectures and supervisions on a subject at University, did no reading, and bought a 'nutshell' guide the day before my exam with the intention of getting up early to give it a skim. I woke up at 4am to start learning and by half four I was asleep again. On the way to the examination hall the fear finally kicked in that I was throwing my entire life away and I threw up in a bin before getting to the exam room and nauseously trying to imagine the answers to questions for three hours while suffering a cold sweat. I'd rather live that entire experience again – several times – than have gone through what the Prime Minister just did.
I hope someone gives the Prime Minister a big sofa, a cup of sweet tea, and the rest of the day off
As she croaked and spluttered through the words, the letters in the logo behind her began to fall off the wall. If this had been the Christmas Special of The Thick Of It, this touch would have been criticised as unrealistically incompetent. Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary who has been forced in recent weeks to castigate the Foreign Secretary for his outbursts, was caught on camera demanding that Boris stand up to applaud their boss. I expect every single man woman and child in the conference hall has enjoyed more pleasurable visits to the dentist, less awkward encounters with their ex wives, or more uplifting muggings than the spectacle of the Prime Minister losing her voice near the outset of a set-piece political performance designed to reinforce her commitment to the job. It was like watching a violinist try to perform with three broken strings and a broom handle for a bow.
At one point Theresa May quoted the murdered Labour MP Jo Cox and reminded the audience that we all have more in common than that which divides us. Today a nation has been brought together in fundamental, visceral sympathy for a Prime Minister who inherited the Kobayashi Maru of political challenges with Brexit, survived the most unnecessary and spectacular political disaster in modern political history, and then went on stage only to be challenged by an embarrassing stunt before losing her voice. Theresa May is a fighter, but that fighter is Monty Python's black knight. Brexit is Britain's greatest political challenge for a generation, her cabinet are in open revolt. Her public image is tarnished, and things just keep going wrong. I hope someone gives the Prime Minister a big sofa, a cup of sweet tea, and the rest of the day off. She may start to think it might be nice if it's the first of many more to come.
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