May was the best PM of a bad lot
Published by The i paper (11th March, 2024)
Theresa May has announced she is leaving the political stage at the next election while polls indicate that the party she headed for three years faces wipeout after 14 years in office despite last week’s budget tricks.
She was one of five Tory leaders, each disastrous in different ways, who will keep historians busy for decades as they debate where to place them in the list of worst British prime ministers. So it seems an opportune time to offer my league table of the quintet who led the country during the Conservative Civil Wars, which left both the nation and party so badly wounded.
1) Theresa May (2016-2019)
May’s reputation is defined by her failure to break the parliamentary deadlock over Brexit. Yet for all her faults, she tried to find a unifying path through the festering swamp of post-referendum politics, despite her meaningless mantra of “Brexit means Brexit”. She almost succeeded in securing a deal that would have retained access to the EU customs union before seeing her efforts – and then her premiership – ripped apart by the selfish hard-right.
Amid the divisions inflamed by a foolish referendum and the determination of both Brexiteers and Remainers to destroy any deal, she faced an uphill struggle. And the characteristics that ensured survival for six years in the home office and propelled the vicar’s daughter to the top job ended up intensifying her struggles in Downing Street with her defensiveness, inscrutability, mistrust and failure to build alliances.
It is ironic that this one-time moderniser who identified how voters saw the Tories as the nasty party in 2002 went on to reinforce this viewpoint during her woeful stint at the Home Office with the “hostile environment” and Windrush scandal. Yet she was serious, smart and seems to believe in public service, shown by her diligence as a backbencher after being ousted. This alone merits applause amid the ego-fuelled vanities of modern politics, offering such striking contrast to her two successors.
May fought hard for women in politics, took on police over racist stop and search, tried to find a way to fund social care and genuinely cared about issues such as mental health and modern slavery. Above all, she ensured Britain was the first big economy to commit to carbon neutrality by 2050, leaving a lasting monument.
2) Rishi Sunak (2022 – ?)
It is telling that a man who has achieved so little in his fag-end administration gets my nod in silver medal position, despite his by-election disasters and dreadful poll ratings. He has proved to be a lousy politician, lamely posing as an agent of change before hiring David Cameron as foreign secretary, and seems devoid of big ideas beyond trying to end smoking. His landmark policy is the Rwanda migrant stunt that simply pours cash into the pocket of a vile dictator, while his crackdown on protests is an assault on free speech and he uses trans citizens to stir up culture wars.
Yet in his favour, he was right to oppose Liz Truss’s economic plans. He has ironed out some post-Brexit problems with our key European trading partners through the Windsor framework to simplify Irish border checks and then rejoining the Horizon and Copernicus scientific-research projects. The absence of permanent chaos feels almost like competence. And he has not sabotaged our long-term national interests.
3) David Cameron (2010-2016)
His six years in office now feel like a distant era under a pragmatic prime minister who modernised his party, backed one-nation conservatism, pushed green policies and skilfully led a coalition that showed us the possibilities of consensual European-style government. His greatest achievement was standing firm against the bigoted right to drive through same-sex marriage but he also advanced Labour’s education reforms, apologised for Bloody Sunday and defeated Scotland’s nationalists.
Sadly, Cameron’s legacy is shredded by three awful errors. The first was cuddling up to the Chinese dictatorship. The second was pushing austerity policies too far, especially with George Osborne’s cowardly decision to overload the cuts on local government which still causes profound problems. The third, and most consequential, was that unforgivable decision – against Osborne’s advice – to give in to the right with the Brexit referendum, a mistake compounded by such a lacklustre campaign. This has scarred the country, corroded the economy and destroyed his reputation.
4) Boris Johnson (2019-2022)
The insider who posed as an insurgent, the populist who became deeply unpopular, the prime minister who could not be bothered with the nitty gritty of policy detail, the charlatan who treated the country with such contempt by partying during pandemic. The few positives from his dire time in Downing Street, such as fast procurement of Covid vaccines and strong support for Ukraine, were overshadowed by the chaos, the deceptions, the ineptitude and the scandals.
He boasted of getting Brexit done, although failed to resolve its contradictions, and built a new electoral coalition on the back of Jeremy Corbyn’s unpopularity. Yet he never offered a serious platform to bind together low-tax, libertarian and free-market Tories with his new big-spending and interventionist supporters from the Red Wall seats while driving out liberals, moderates and Remainers. For all his boosterism, he left behind a weaker nation facing grave economic and social problems while staining our democracy.
5) Liz Truss (2022)
She posed as the reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher and promised to usher in a radical new era of fast growth based on low taxes and deregulation. Instead, she was forced out of office after 45 humiliating days of blunders, chaos and U-turns, lasting barely one-third of the time of George Canning, the next shortest-serving prime minister. Now she rants about the deep state to far-right US forums while backing, with tragic lack of self-awareness, a group called Popular Conservatism.