On the pleasure of Theresa May’s downfall
Another General Election, another wasted vote. For the record, I’ll vote Liberal Democrat and reasonably enthusiastically.
I wrote that sentence on Thursday afternoon. It was the opening line in a post about despair with the British political climate. You know, about how literally everything you cherish and stand for can suddenly be swept into the corner while the old and the ignorant and the authoritarian scaredy cats party dementedly in the room while pointing and laughing at you. You lost, we won, get over it.
I never wrote the post, though, because actually I couldn’t be arsed. I picked up my guitar instead. I’d decided to spend more time learning finger-picking than tweeting and ranting. A strategy that had already been working quite well for a couple of weeks, leaving me more sanguine and relaxed about everything. Because, fuck it. Fuck em all.
If the debacle of the EU referendum had taught me anything, it was that argument and debate are futile. That we mostly rely on System 1 thinking to decide where we stand and then pretend to use System 2 thinking by harvesting as much information as possible to justify those instincts. And that changing our minds on something is a step too far for most of us, whatever the evidence.
Here’s where I was at.
I’d just cast my vote in a safe, rural Conservative seat. The youngest person in the vicinity of the polling station by some margin. I’m 55. My neigbours (the loveliest people you could meet — and genuine friends) had Conservative posters up on some of their field boundaries (they’re farmers) and I knew there was no hope of my vote making a difference. Besides, the polls were saying my party could dwindle to three or four seats nationally.
It wasn’t a tactical vote. I’m a card-carrying Liberal Democrat. Easy decision for me, the Lib Dems being the clear — if hopelessly optimistic — challenger, where I voted. My partner did vote tactically, though. Labour were the challenger in her seat and she even had a Labour poster up in her window.
She has never voted Labour before.
She had said, a couple of weeks previously, that she thought May had fatally miscalculated. That the educated, urban, middle class, socially liberal milieu with whom we identify would desert the Conservatives. She was calling a hung parliament.
I’d been calling a 40 seat Conservative majority until the final few days. I was now calling a Tory landslide.
Months of being told, online, to stop over-reacting to the illiberal rhetoric of a Prime Minister interested mainly in garnering the support of UKIP voters had got through to me. I told myself none of it mattered any more because I’m going to be officially resident in France by the end of the year and possibly a French citizen at some point. Britain, you are dead to me, about summed it up.
A year of being cast variously by my own government and its supporters as a ‘citizen of nowhere’, a ‘Remoaner’, a ‘saboteur’ even, had taken its toll. I was done.
I was completely unprepared for the exquisite pleasure of watching the work of the worst Prime Minister of my lifetime unraveling in real time, from 10pm until I went to bed at 5am.
The moment I will cherish forever came just after 3am. A split screen. On one side a beaming oldish chap, arriving for his count, walking tall, applauded by supporters, looking like the family’s favourite uncle rolling up to a ruby wedding party. On the other side a visibly shaken woman, apparently 10 years older than a couple of months ago, literally stooping under the weight of realisation that she had fucked her career, her execrable party and her country by making the most spectacular political miscalculation imaginable.
Momentarily, as I watched her pinched and drawn face, exhausted, frightened eyes and pursed lips I felt a little surge of pity. You could see the tumult in her head. The empathy came as a shock. The myriad shitstorms she was unleashing were cascading through my own head and it felt awful to imagine being Theresa May.
But then I remembered how self-serving this genuinely dreadful human being is. How she had spent her political life cravenly pandering to the most illiberal voices in her world while seeking to sideline all voices of dissent. How her undiluted sense of entitlement had served her so well, from the moment she decided at university that she would like to become prime minister, to the moment she had called a General Election she’d said she would not call.
Here she was. Teflon Theresa. Reduced to a dried out husk of a person. Suffocating under the weight of chickens all coming home to roost at once. God that was delicious. It was a therapeutic moment. We love to see the baddie get their comeuppance and, fuck yeah, this was some comeuppance. I basked in the joy of hearing her faltering voice as she gave her acceptance speech. The woman some male Tory colleagues call ‘mummy’ feeling her authority not so much draining away as evacuating instantly, like a particularly egregious bowel movement.
Here’s where I was at.
In the 48 hours that have followed I have stopped feeling angry and frustrated. Instead I have been enjoying the show. A gift that will keep on giving.
The pooled interview clip, on Friday, in which she appeared to be about to cry, was wonderful. The robotic mantra changing from ‘strong and stable’ to ‘certainty’ and ‘in the country’s interest’ was particularly comedic. It is now like watching someone parodying the parodies of themselves. Theresa Mayhem writ large. But with the mayhem now visited on herself and her own people, instead of the rest of us. Theresa Maygabe as was — but no longer even fit to be compared with a corrupt, bullying African president. Chairwoman Theresa Mao and her pissy little red book of mantras about ‘JAMs’ and a country that works for everyone (unless you’re literally anyone who isn’t a social conservative) seeing her cultural revolution replaced by insoluble chaos.
Nearly every political career necessarily ends in failure but hers is ending in thoroughly deserved humiliation.
I’m happy that she is staying on. She deserves to suffer. To limp from crisis to crisis, while the grandees and kingmakers of her party scrabble around for a workable replacement. I’m convinced that if it were up to her, she’d have resigned already. I really hope so. I’m thrilled to see her wonks ejected from №10. Without Timothy and Fiona she will be lost, lonely, largely friendless and effectively a cardboard cutout of a prime minister, taking orders from people she has grievously disappointed.
I’m thrilled that we (remainers & social liberals) won the election. Because although it might not yet be apparent to everyone, we did.
Here’s where I’m at now.
