Theresa May’s #EggGate: Cracks Emerge in the Conservative Party
May’s seemingly petty Easter egg comments expose significant internal strife within the Conservative Party and the timid populism of the Prime Minister.
UK Politics
Luke Hurst
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After a shockingly ridiculous period in politics — Vote Leave in the EU Referendum fighting their campaign on the issue of bananas being just one example of this — Theresa May recently confirmed the absurdity of the political climate by publicly condemning Cadbury and the National Trust for, allegedly, omitting the word ‘Easter’ from promotional material for their annual egg hunt.
May described the omission of the apparently sacred word as “absolutely ridiculous”, and defended the event from this supposedly reprehensible disrespect, saying: “Easter’s very important… It’s a very important festival for the Christian faith for millions across the world.”
However, rather embarrassingly, the word ‘Easter’ was still very much present in most of the advertising for the much-loved event, and May appears to have prematurely gone nuclear over the most trivial of minutiae.
Whilst this whole fiasco may be faintly amusing at first, it provides a telling insight into the government and the wider situation in the Conservative Party.
Fundamentally, the Prime Minister’s unnecessary involvement in something that should not even merit inclusion on her daily agenda, and was completely overstated and exaggerated by the media, should be of concern to us all. At this moment, Britain is faced with complex negotiations with the EU, Holyrood’s demands for another independence referendum and the prospect of Irish reunification; the UK’s circumstances are fragile, to say the least.
Surely, instead of making somewhat libellous claims against a chocolate manufacturer and a conservation charity, the Prime Minister should be applying herself to these political challenges and prompting her cabinet to work on more pressing matters. Perhaps producing an economic and judicial risk assessment on Brexit, something the Tories have negligently failed to compile so far, would be a starting point. Clarifying that Britain is not threatening its major ally Spain with war over Gibraltar, as Michael Howard and much of the right-wing media have ludicrously suggested, might also be worth devoting some time to.
The most alarming aspect of the Easter egg comments though, is the very real and feasible possibility that May made these pedantic statements to satisfy the right-wing bulldog biting at her ankles. It is no secret that the hard-right has set its sights on some of the most significant positions in government since Britain voted for Brexit. Nor is it a secret that the Conservatives’ heightened public popularity is, in part, bolstered by nationalists in the electorate, particularly defectors from UKIP. The government’s approach following the referendum has intrinsically focused on appeasing this faction.
Theresa May and the Conservatives hang awkwardly in a position in which their administration relies precariously on the hard-right. Consequently, the Prime Minister has resorted to sheer demagoguery. Her drastic shift from Remainer before the referendum, to staunch Brexiteer — threatening to leave the EU with no deal — since her appointment as the Prime Minister, epitomises this.
Her comments, it seems, were delivered to characterise herself, and subsequently her party, as bold enough to defend the tradition of Easter against marketing that reactionaries predictably branded as politically-correct and obsessively modified, to accommodate our multi-faith society; they believe ‘Easter’ was left out in order to minimise offence to non-Christians.
However, as we know that the marketing did in fact not omit ‘Easter’, the only obsessive behaviour here is that of those people desperate to proclaim an attack on Britishness, and Theresa May, frenziedly pandering to them. It seems likely that May believed this Easter-related soundbite would fit in well to her repertoire of similarly hollow statements aimed at the alt-right and nationalist faction of her party, like that inconsequential commitment to a ‘red, white and blue Brexit’.
Unfortunately for May, her eagerness to seize the opportunity for some supportive media coverage completely missed the invalidity of her criticism of Cadbury and the National Trust, and conclusively, it has only served to highlight her weakness and to substantiate accusations that she is a slave to the rightists settling themselves on the mainstage of British politics and her party.
At a time when Jeremy Corbyn’s management of the Labour Party is under particularly intense scrutiny, as we now enter a General Election, this revealing insight into Theresa May’s Conservative Party is equally as fascinating. And, although the Tories boast a tremendous lead in the polls , this debacle highlights that all is not as auspicious as it seems.
