The making of the Maybot: a year of mindless slogans, U-turns and denials | Politics
I christened Theresa May “the Maybot†after an interview she gave on a trade mission to India in November last year. Even by her own low standards, this was a car crash.
“Have you made any plans for a Brexit transitional deal?†inquired a Sky News reporter.
Whirr. Clunk. Clang. The Maybot’s eyes rotated into life. “I’m focusing on delivering article 50,†she replied, unable to prevent herself from answering an entirely different question.
“Will you be able to deliver on the £350m that was promised to the NHS?†the reporter persevered.
“When the people. Whirr. Voted in the referendum. Clunk. They wanted. Clang. A number of different things,†said the Maybot, struggling with her circuit board.
“Was the referendum dishonest … ?â€
Inside the Maybot, the last shards of the real Theresa were fighting to get out. She was not a number. Especially not 350 million. She was a person in her own right. She did still have a mind of her own. Then the malware took over again.
“Whirr. The referendum took. Clunk. Place. I’m focusing … †She wasn’t. She really wasn’t.
“You weren’t part of the Vote Leave campaign, you weren’t prime minister at the time of the referendum and you have no mandate,†observed the reporter sharply.
“I’m. Whirr. Determined …â€
“You’re determined to be what … ?â€
“I’m. Whirr. Determined. To be. Clunk. Determined to focus on the. Clang. Things that the British public determined … â€
For several months after she became prime minister, May had managed to get along by repeating “Brexit means Brexit†and “No deal is better than a bad deal†whenever she was questioned about when Britain would be leaving the EU, and on what terms. If anyone tried to press her for more details, she would say that she had a plan but that she couldn’t reveal it to anyone in case the other 27 members of the EU found out what it was.
Some, eager to believe that Brexit was going to be an unmitigated triumph and that May, ably supported by her two minders, Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy, was entirely in command of the situation, took “Brexit means Brexit†to mean something profound. Others, myself included, began to suspect that her brain had been hacked and she had been reduced to repeating mindless slogans. The Sky interview merely confirmed it.
Thereafter, the Maybot stuck. At least with me. It seemed to encapsulate her awkward, disengaged manner and her inner mediocrity. Far from being a strong leader, she appeared weak and confused. While the rightwing press in the UK were building her up as a tough negotiator, I could only imagine the other EU countries rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of doing business with her.
The rise of the Maybot began as a process of elimination. Throughout the EU referendum campaign, David Cameron insisted he would stay on as prime minister regardless of the result; but within hours of Britain voting to leave, Dave headed for the hills. Almost immediately, several Tories started eyeing up the main chance in what would turn out to be a race to the bottom.
Boris Johnson never even made it to the starting line after his fellow Vote Leave frontman, Michael Gove, overnight decided to run for party leader. Stephen Crabb and Liam Fox were knocked out in the first round, Crabb because no one knew who he was and Fox because everyone knew exactly who he was. Gove fell at the next hurdle, leaving a straight fight between Andrea Leadsom and May.
The former’s “Rally4Leadsom†â€" consisting of Tim Loughton, Theresa Villiers and a handful of bemused stragglers walking a couple of hundred yards to Westminster shouting: “Who do we want? Andrea Leadsom! When do we want her? Sometime quite soon!†â€" was the highlight of the leadership campaign for the political sketchwriters. Within days, she had given an interview to the Times in which she repeated her insistence that being a mother made her better qualified, and this time there was an outcry that forced her to drop out.
The leadership race was over before it had really got going, and May became prime minister by default. Just as in the referendum campaign, where she had remained largely mute, her success owed as much to her silence as anything else â€" and no one had even thought to question her less-than-impressive credentials as home secretary.
May looked like the safest pair of hands around, and when she did a ghastly scripted imitation of Margaret Thatcher at her first prime minister’s questions â€" “Remind you of anyone?†â€" most Tory backbenchers breathed a huge sigh of relief. If the Conservatives couldn’t have the real Maggie, then a second-rate pastiche was the next best thing.
When she made her first speech as prime minister outside Downing Street, a year ago this week, she talked of governing in the interests of all those who had been left behind and felt disengaged from the political process. And that was just about the last anyone would hear of that, as one subject and one subject only came to dominate the agenda. Brexit. And Brexit only ever seemed to spur her into more and more soundbites. Brexit means Brexit means Brexit. When pushed, Brexit sometimes also meant a Red, White and Blue Brexit.
The Maybot didn’t help her cause by going to the supreme court to challenge the judgment that parliament must be allowed a vote on the triggering of article 50. She lost that, along with a little more of her credibility. A strong leader who believes in what she is doing shouldn’t be afraid of giving parliament a say. After all, the whole point of the EU vote for most Brexiters had been to return sovereignty to the UK parliament. It made the Maybot look as if she didn’t really believe in anything other than her own survival.
Sometimes, it even looked as if the Maybot was trying to be wilfully vague. Which was more important, asked Sky’s Sophy Ridge in January: reducing immigration or remaining part of the single market? The Maybot whirred into inaction. We were going to take back control of our borders and get the very best deal for Britain because Brexit meant Brexit and the people had spoken.
Understandably, Ridge looked a little puzzled by this and tried asking the same question again. This time, the Maybot insisted the issue wasn’t binary â€" which would have come as news to the rest of the EU, for whom it was precisely that â€" but that we were still going to take back control and get a deal that would be good for Britain as well as the EU.
“You seem to be saying that controlling immigration is more important than staying in the single market,†Ridge said, trying to make some sense of what she had heard. The Maybot looked horrified that any of her answers could have been clearly interpreted.
At every turn in the process of the article 50 legislation, the Maybot seemed to imagine the Labour party was determined to thwart her. Or “the will of the peopleâ€, as she chose to call it. The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, always looked rather confused by this. And no wonder, for Labour consistently backed the government’s bill and the legislation was passed with an overwhelming majority. A little while later, Fiona and Nick broke it to the Maybot that she had actually won, and article 50 was triggered at the end of March. Many Brexiters celebrated loudly. As did many in the EU. With the clock ticking, Brexit was now going to be Britain’s problem more than theirs.
Throughout all this, the Maybot had at least been clear on one thing. Seven times she had been asked if she was going to call a general election, and seven times she had said no. And then, over Easter, she changed her mind. She said it had been as a result of a conversation with her husband, Philip, but no one believed that for a second. Everyone knew that the Maybot was controlled by Fiona and Nick. It was they who had spotted the Tories were consistently 20 points ahead of Labour in the polls and decided to go in for the kill.
They had reckoned without the vote-losing properties of the Maybot. Right from the beginning of the campaign, the Maybot went into full automaton mode. She refused to take part in any TV debates and she was kept well away from the public at every opportunity.
An early outing to Bridgend was a case in point. “This is the most important election in my lifetime,†she told a small group of party activists in a near empty community hall â€" primarily because it was the only one in which she had ever stood as Supreme Leader. And what she wanted was a mandate so large she would still be in power long after she and everyone else in the room had died. Even eternity wasn’t long enough. Her eyes scoured the room for the merest hint of dissent. None came. No one dared even blink. Or breathe.
The Maybot told herself to relax and try harder to engage with her people, but she wasn’t entirely sure how to do so. It was so hard to do empathy when everyone in the room was weak and unstable. She willed her eyes to convey warmth, but they remained ice-cold. “What this country needs is strong and stable leadership,†she continued. “And only I can provide that strong and stable leadership.†Anything less was unthinkable.
It still took time for her support to haemorrhage. The turning point came with the launch of Fiona and Nick’s party manifesto in Halifax. No member of the cabinet had been allowed to see it until hours before the launch, and the Maybot had only got to read it moments before them. And no one had bothered to go to the trouble of costing it. Within a matter of days, she was forced to do a U-turn on the dementia tax while also trying to downplay axing winter fuel payments and free school dinners.
“Nothing has changed,†the Maybot repeatedly told the BBC’s Andrew Neil in a TV interview. All that had changed was that everything had changed. The manifesto had never been intended to be seen as a policy document. Rather, it was just a set of vague principles. Random words that just happened to have been strung into sentences. The idea that anyone was ever meant to take it seriously was “fake claimsâ€.
There were belated attempts to reboot the Maybot, but to all intents and purposes, Maybot 2.0 looked much the same as Maybot 1.0. The only difference was that by now, many different news organisations â€" including foreign newspapers â€" were referring to her as the Maybot. Even the rightwing media started openly laughing at her and calling her weak and wobbly. Collins received a submission for the word Maybot to be included in its English dictionary. Despite this, it still came as a surprise to everyone, not least the Labour party, that she managed to actually lose seats at the general election. Instead of returning to Westminster with a landslide majority as had been expected, she was left to try and form a minority government.
Not that anyone appeared to have told the Maybot the election result. Either that or she was trapped in the first phase of election grief: denial. There had been no election. She hadn’t blown a 20-point lead in the opinion polls in just over seven weeks. She hadn’t just run the worst campaign in living memory. She hadn’t published a manifesto that had needed to be pulped before the ink was dry. Everything was normal. Nothing had happened. She was still the Supreme Leader. All was well.
After going to visit the Queen, the Maybot made her way slowly towards the wooden lectern set up outside the front door of No 10. Her wheels often found it difficult to cope with uneven surfaces. A helicopter hovering overhead made it difficult to pick out the Supreme Leader’s words. No matter. She didn’t really have anything of interest to say.
“I will now form a government,†the Maybot murmured in a catatonic monotone. “A government that can provide certainty and lead Britain forward at this critical time for our country.†Government. Certainty. Forward. Not the three words that were on anyone else’s tongue. It was as if she had been awoken from a seven-week cryogenic state and had decided to mix things up just for the hell of it.
Being in government with … with … with … She couldn’t remember the names of any of her cabinet colleagues. Probably because she had never taken the trouble to learn them. She was the Supreme Leader and they were nothing. Strong and stable. Strong and stable.
The Maybot herself was the only person apparently unable to understand just how diminished a leader she was. The Tory party was quick to remind her of the new realities. Fiona and Nick were kicked out of No 10 and the Maybot was forced to do the grubbiest of grubby deals with the DUP. The Maybot would be allowed to continue on sufferance, primarily because there weren’t any obviously more capable candidates. The gene pool of talent in the Tory party was that poor. Besides which, no one in their right mind would take over the party when there was a strong possibility that Brexit would be a two-year â€" and counting â€" nightmare.
The Maybot’s punishment would be to remain as prime minister. In just a year, the Maybot had imploded entirely. It had come to this â€" from being lauded as the saviour of the Conservative party to begging Labour for some policy ideas. A year in which her true mediocrity had been exposed.
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