"Honeymoon" was always a bad metaphor for the suspension of competitive politics that eases a new prime minister into the job. For all but the most lavish and work-shy couples, a honeymoon has a defined end date. Political pampering lasts as long as it lasts: for Tony Blair, his whole first term; for Gordon Brown, a summer. If it resembles any matter of the heart, it is marriage itself.
This uncertainty invites commentators to call the end of a honeymoon like the peak of a market. They sense the Theresa May bubble popping. Vacillation over a nuclear project, a provocative revival of grammar schools, a lack of grace towards David Cameron, her predecessor, and all his works: people notice these things.
Some see similarities to Brown's aggression and paranoia in the woman who was previously said to match Angela Merkel for circumspection in command.
Hold off on that call, though. When a UK prime minister’s grace period ends, it is as unmistakable as the air leaving a person’s lungs after a stomach punch. We will know about it and they will know about it. This is not it.
In fact, she has little reason to feel chastened by recent weeks. Bear in mind that May is probably quite good at politics, what with her becoming prime minister and all. She got the job without recruiting the media or showing much talent for oratory. Instead, she communicates through symbol and gesture. Like a good novelist, she shows rather than tells.
Ideas
As ideas for government, academic selection at age 11 and seats for workers on company boards both struggle for respectability. But if they signal to inattentive voters that May is strong in the face of liberal convention and nostalgic for life at some indistinct point in the past, then they have served her, for that is her political identity and that is the national mood. The policies themselves are slight; the meaning attached to the policies is the jewel.
Seen from this angle, her hesitant approval for the Hinkley nuclear plant looks less like beginner’s nerves than calculation. It allowed her to puff herself up as a guardian of Britain’s security without, in the end, incinerating its stock of goodwill with important countries.
Everything she has done in these opening months, including the brutal reshuffle of her cabinet, has conveyed strength and novelty without involving much material change. It takes a master of semiotics to create such definition at so little practical risk.
There are deeper minds and better speakers. She may turn out to be a disaster on every matter of substance. But, in a way that is probably uncoachable, May understands politics. She knows that policies have a symbolic potency beyond their innate technical merits.
Even in his pomp, Cameron used to say that he would never have “a people”. No section of the electorate would identify with him at a gut level. May could easily have a people: middle-class, suburban-to-provincial, plain in taste, respectably right-wing, unnerved but not unhinged by modernity.
They want a break from the liberal imperium of the past 40 years but blanch at a UK Independence Party whose new leader, Diane James, identifies Vladimir Putin as a hero. They are the kind of voters who do not really mind foreign companies buying British ones but would quite like a leader who does mind.
May’s people
Once you understand May’s people, and their awesome number, her recent gestures make sense. She is not trying to appeal to me, or to
George Osborne
, the former chancellor of the exchequer, who says he will speak for the “liberal mainstream” from the backbenches – or even to
Philip Hammond
, his replacement, who is said to harbour classic treasury doubts about May’s neo-corporatism.
It is by choice, not incompetence, that she is burning some kinds of support to remake the Conservatives as a Christian Democrat party in all but name. Spotting a growth market in votes, she has chosen clarity of definition over the husbanding of political capital.
Her critics are not wrong, however, just premature. Political gravity will return, either when she finally makes a decision about airport capacity in and around London, or when she triggers article 50 to begin Britain’s formal extrication from the EU.
Those questions have no answers that do not leave at least some people seething. Until then, her newbie’s exemption from reality stands. She should not worry that these are difficult weeks. She should worry that these are the best weeks she will ever know.
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016