Theresa May is retiring. Thank heavens, I thought. Apparently not everyone agreed.
So, I struggled to recall her achievements.
She once called the Tories the Nasty Party. That was, I think, the high spot.
She was a hideous, cruel, and in my opinion, racist Home Secretary who sought to divide society over migration with her ‘Go home' vans.
She replaced Cameron without a vote eventually being required, but then her opponent until she withdrew was Andrea Leadsom.
She was a worse Prime Minister than David Cameron, with her reputation only salvaged by those who have come since.
She said ‘Brexit meant Brexit' and no one has ever known what she meant. All we know was that it did destroy her career.
She thought Nicholas Timothy was worth relying on. She called a general election at his suggestion. She lost badly and bunged £1 billion at Ulster Unionist politicians to survive in office.
Her party rightly got rid of her.
And throughout all this no-one had the slightest idea why she was a politician, because she had neither the wit to work out what that reason was or the ability to explain it.
But in that sense she really was a true Tory. Believing in anything but greed and their right to both govern and to simultaneously be nasty seems to be beyond them.
Could it be that their time has come? May's has, and I sincerely hope that she does not go to the Lords. It would be great if we never saw her sort again.
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Just before she became PM, I was speaking to a Guardian Journalist who described her as the ‘least worst’ candidate and seeing what followed I think we was right
Theresa May did manage to bring in the psychoactives drugs ban, energy price cap and the net-zero declaration so she wasn’t all bad.
That last one is legally binding.
That’s a bit desperate
And the net-zero commitment was a grab for legacy, I suggest
The Energy Price Cap is classic Tory con trick.
It sounds as if it is an upper limit on what you can be charged and will protect you from the sharks that own our energy.
In reality, it is a conspiracy between them and the Tory party so that when they increase prices, by increasing the “energy price cap”, it sounds as if they are doing you a favour.
And it is if you have shares in energy companies.
And legally binding is a bit of a bogus concept.
What are the sanctions if the government fails to achieve net zero? None. Will any politician go to jail if they fail? No. Will they even pay a fine (Michelle Donelan, I’m looking at you)? No.
So legally binding is pretty meaningless.
My option is that Theresa May is the worst Prime Minister of recent times, and it’s a crowded field. Her racism and authoritarianism were evil. But the worst thing was her criminally incompetent handling of Brexit, which made it so much worse than it needed to be.
Well said
The PMs since haven’t been an improvement.
There’s a mould somewhere that needs to be smashed.
“There’s a mould somewhere that needs to be smashed.”
It’s in Oxford. Unfortunately, several colleges there have similar copies with their own “intriguing” addenda.
Very sadly Nick Timothy is likely to be the MP for West Suffolk (near us) after the next election, as he’s been chosen as the Tory candidate there (replacing – after boundary changes – Matt Hancock). So another right wing nutter in East Anglia (Liz Truss, Badenoch, Patel, and not forgetting Therese Coffey).
May: 2002 “this party has become the nasty party”, and zoom 10 years later: the ‘hostile environment’.
There is nothing to celebrate with May.
Their parents, I meant .
Take comfort from the fact that there has been some enormous swings in by elections. No Tory seat is actually safe.
Oh – she was awful. No airbrushing can remove the stains of “citizens of nowhere”, the Windrush scandal, the the failure to pursue those responsible for Grenfell and the “hostile environment” with all the poison which that has effectively injected into official – official – ‘British’ not to say ‘Brexitanian’ public life. And that shocking list is before we get to her brazen stupidity and attempt at a self-serving Brexit ‘policy’, lunging heedless for a totally unnecessary and politically and economically insane, rapid hard Brexit, just to attempt to hang on to the faux unity of her rudderless party – and her own job. And what made the cocktail of malevolence and selfish incomopetence even worse was the nauseating posture of Christian righteousness with which it was all administered right up to and including her snap answer about pressing the nuclear button and her prim self-pitying announcement about ordering the bombing of Syria.
The latter drew the following from me, with apologies to Edward Thomas….
THE SECOND TIME
(On Theresa May’s statement that this was “the first time”
that she had committed British troops to war.)
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire
The little traces that remain
Recall that superheated day
The molten Cotwolds filled the plain.
That hour the Churn was vaporised,
When Ampney’s Crucis came to pass
And Aston Magna seemed misspelt,
There stayed no splendour on the grass;
But cornfields, now with May aflame,
Swept from Slaughter on to Slaughter
And toadstool vapours borne on winds
Sucked up sweet Avon’s bardic water.
No village Churchill could withstand
That black, bird-stunning bitter crop;
Five miles north west, war’s poet paused.
Yes. I remember Adlestrop.
The fact that her degenerate successors stooped to feed off the destruction she caused is no exoneration.
Thank you
To Nigel Mace:
Thank you for the illustration of the power of words… “Thank you” seems an inadequate recompense for those words today.
That £1 billion sweetener to the DUP: does anyone know what they did with it?
No
The funds went to the Northern Ireland Executive, not the DUP. The latest statement shows they were spent on:
Infrastructure development (£200m for 2 years)
Health service transformation (£100m for 2 years)
Broadband development (£75m for 2 years)
Immediate pressures in health and education (£50m for 2 years)
Pockets of severe deprivation (£20m for 5 years)
Mental health (£10m for 5 years)
Link here: https://factcheckni.org/topics/economy/has-the-dup-brought-an-extra-1bn/
“And throughout all this no-one had the slightest idea why she was a politician,”
Rich husband & thus able to indulge her fancy to be a politician – is one possible explanation.
As for her record: Guardian July 2016:
“Her six years at the Home Office were marked by an instinctive secrecy, a talent for “going missing” or delegating when things went wrong, and a too careless approach to civil liberties. Her capacity to make herself scarce at key moments of political danger peaked during the referendum campaign. Her minimal public contribution not only failed to defend her record on immigration but instead focused on her personal pledge to withdraw from the European convention on human rights to demonstrate that she was a wafer-thin remainer”.
There was also a constituent who met her in I think Jan 2017 to express concern re Brexit (constituent owned a restaurant). May radiated hostility.
May, nasty piece of work & thus highly representative of tories in general.
Nobody seems to remember her Dancing Queen……….. I’m afraid I do.
🙂
May is a perfect target for the primary target list, as in Devon. She probably saw the list and thought she ought to resign at the election, knowing she was targeted. The party will still be targeted in Maidenhead whether she is there or not.
There’s an an excellent critique in today’s National. https://www.thenational.scot/politics/24174382.theresa-may-not-good-egg—disgrace-brought-scandal/
She also gave the green light to racists making racism mainstream and acceptable and enabling the current racists at the top of the Tory Party. But this is not new, as Prof. Mike Cole argues in his book, tracing racism in the Tory Party over the past 200 years. https://www.routledge.com/Racism-and-the-Tory-Party-From-Disraeli-to-Johnson/Cole/p/book/9781032056753
What’s most depressing about her legacy, is she was superseded as both home secretary and prime minister by characters far worse in ability, morals and humanity.
And last week’s Tory bragging that they had recruited 20,000 police officers …
Er … Which Home Secretary got rid of them so that 20,000 had to be recruited?