To think Theresa May was given a very hard time?

[plodalong12]

Just as the thread title says really. I feel like she had a really hard time whilst trying to manage a poisoned chalice in the form of Brexit.
I also think it’s interesting that it’s the tories and other political parties that have had female leaders but the Labour Party has so far had none despite putting themselves across as the party of equality.

She was an appalling home sec and an appalling pm.
But then nearly all our politicians are self-serving hypocrites.

Anyone remember this?

@VladmirsPoutine

Theresa May is racist. As is Boris Johnson.

Tories and racism go together much like cheese on toast. However, they do treat their token minorities with a great deal more respect than Labour does.

You must really struggle with facts and reality. You don’t have to be a Tory voter to see BAME people reaching positions of power as Tories.

You don’t have to be a Tory voter to see BAME people reaching positions of power as Tories

Yeah, that’s like saying “I can’t be racist because I’ve got black friends”. It doesn’t wash.

I never voted for her but I admire her for raising the hard, unpopular issue of who should pay for elderly care when the service user may be cash-poor but asset-rich due to the value of their property.

Unfortunately her policy was hilariously awful and created the ultimate perverse incentive (to die suddenly before you needed care) but at least she recognised the potential unfairness.

[quote Zilla1]@XDownwiththissortofthingX I don't recall seeing his personal opinion and I agree about the working class being affected the worst but I thought the impression at the time was that Corbyn was anti-EU possibly due to its role in contracting out exercises impacting on workers' wages together with freedom of movement and the Swedish cases leading to difficulty in applying national minimum wage to offshore providers and such like. Overall, I understood his position to be that EU membership adversely affected working class workers to the benefit or corporates. Supposition on the media's part but to an outsider, his support for remain looked lukewarm at best despite his assertions otherwise.[/quote]
Oh I think it's beyond question that Corbyn was personally very cool on the idea of remaining in the EU, however, at the relevant point in time he was leader of the opposition, and head of a party with an official policy of the UK remaining inside the EU.

Considering this, along with the history of the Labour Party being what it is, the fact he was quite obviously apathetic about campaigning to remain and convince Labour voters of the importance of the vote, was a huge dereliction of duty and, in a way, entirely at odds with Labour's long-standing claim of being the party that sticks up for the working class.

@skyblue

I think you are rewriting history. If anything she stabbed herself in the back.

@XDownwiththissortofthingX I agree.

I might be mistaken but when asked during the campaign, I remember him saying he'd campaigned hard but it didn't look like it to me. I think most of the mainstream parties and BBC thought a remain result was inevitable.

She only got the job in the first place because Johnson stepped back from it. He fully knew it would be a shit show and so it made sense for someone else to do the heavy lifting so he could sweep in and get all the glory at the end. Yes, she was bullied, and she was also terrible - committing to leave the single market and customs union was a terrible, terrible, decision and we will (particularly Northern Ireland) will be facing the consequences of that for probably a long time.

She was a rubbish PM. She just wasn't as rubbish as Boris Johnson. She fucked up over Windrush, fed xenophobia with her 'citizens of nowhere' speech and put party before country with her Brexit choices. The current Brexit disaster is also down to her in part.

[quote Zilla1]@XDownwiththissortofthingX I agree.

I might be mistaken but when asked during the campaign, I remember him saying he'd campaigned hard but it didn't look like it to me. I think most of the mainstream parties and BBC thought a remain result was inevitable.[/quote]
To give him his due, when he did appear during the build up to the referendum, he did consistently state that he believed people should be voting to remain in the EU.

Where the dereliction of duty comes in, is that in typical Corbyn style, while Bojo was on the evening news with his big read bus, Farage was pulling publicity stunts left and right, JC was turning up at village fetes, commissionings of new post-boxes, and AGM's of microminority groups that even local news sources weren't interested in.

He totally hid, but in a manner that meant he couldn't ever be outright accused of deliberately making himself absent. Compared to what the major players in the 'leave' campaign were doing, he acted as if it was no more important than the choice of which biscuits to have with an afternoon cup of tea.

@XDownwiththissortofthingX that was my recollection too.

On reflection, I never saw a convincing explanation for why the 2017 general election performance and his 'Oh Jeremy Corbyn' Glastonbury momentum leaked to the 2019 result against Boris though I've not thought about it much, nor looked back to see the numbers and reviewed the chronology.

Could Boris' charisma really have convinced voters who voted JC in 2017 to vote Conservative in 2019? Wouldn't pro Brexit voters in 2019 also voted for Theresa in 2017?

@Zilla1 remember that in 2017 Labour's stated policy was to deliver Brexit - a soft version, but still Brexit.

By 2019 they had switched to supporting a second referendum. In fact their policy was to negotiate a (soft) Brexit with the EU, then ask the public to vote on whether they wanted that or Remain. Several of their senior figures said that they would vote Remain in the second referendum irrespective of the deal agreed with the EU.

I would say that Labour went into 2017 as a Brexit party (just) but went into 2019 as a Remain party (clearly) and therefore lost pro-Brexit votes. There's a very good book called "Left Out" which explains that the Labour top brass saw some private polls shortly after Boris Johnson became PM which were terrifyingly bad for them, so decided to grab the Remain votes that were available in an attempt to achieve at least a respectable second place.

She went for the job for its own sake, without any kind of vision of what she wanted to achieve and how. She never really understood Brexit, assumed that the motive for voting Leave was entirely about immigration and tried to stay in the very institutions people wanted out of.

There were plenty of people on the Leave campaign who were more pragmatic, recognised the closeness of the vote and suggested that EFTA would represent an acceptable compromise. May refused to compromise.

Then she called the 2017 election, apparently on a whim. Which was a disaster.

No one forced her to put her name forward to be PM. You may feel that she was handed a "poisoned chalice". What you fail to recognise is that she knowingly made a grab for it.

Would she have handled the pandemic better? Possibly, her zeal for clamping down on immigration may have lead her to shut the borders at the first opportunity. What I do know is that many of the problems the UK had can be traced back much further than the Johnson administration. The perishable equipment stockpile for example had been mishandled thanks to contracts made in the early years of the Coalition Government. Issues of an obese society, and of care homes dependant upon agency staff have been problems for decades.

@stuckdownahole thank you. I'd forgotten about the second referendum.

TM wanted the job, She did not have to take it.
When she started she tried to ignore the Referendum Result. She wanted to keep us in.
Boris had such a difficult job because (one reason ) time was so short and not long enough to do proper negotiations.
She wasted 18 months of negotiating time. She also kept sacking her Ministers and advisers. 2/10

I both liked and respected her. I could see though she wasn't suited to be PM but she was massively hard working, diligent and clever and was so good with victims of crime. This is from my own personal observation and not from the media.

I liked her when she first became PM, she seemed a bit more human than most of her colleagues. I always admired her for the way she stood up for Gary McKinnon.

But she played the whole thing badly. Off the back of one positive popularity poll she turned arrogant and gloating, I'd never seen such a rapid personality change. And if she wasn't being all "Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough" at Jeremy Corbin, she was being ultra memeable with her talk about running through fields of wheat. It was jarring. To this day I've no idea what her advisors were trying to achieve. In fact I'd suspect they were all on Boris's payroll if not for the fact that the same people seem to be poorly advising him.

I would say that she seemed less useless than Boris, less vindictive than David Cameron. Of the three she's the one I'd put in charge. But the other two understand that image and spin count for far more than anything else, and that's what she badly misjudged. After becoming PM was not the time to start trying on personas. If she'd just been herself she might still be PM now.

@adeleh

Yes, she was, but she handled things appallingly. She didn’t have to insist on the hard Brexit she went for. She was an absolute fucking idiot to trigger Article 50 with no plan.

And don’t get me started on her behaviour over Windrush.

How much did she give the DUP for their support?

She was a LOT better than Johnson, but she was dreadful.

This!! She was bloody awful. No ideas. Cowering to her party. Poor strategy, terrible premature triggering of Brexit and elections. Paid the DUP a billion to keep her party in power after her cockup but refused to shake the ‘magic money tree’ which meant we carried on with more austerity and a health service critically short of staff and unable to cope with what followed. Good bloody riddance and I say that even with the shower of shit that followed her.

@AnneElliott

I both liked and respected her. I could see though she wasn't suited to be PM but she was massively hard working, diligent and clever and was so good with victims of crime. This is from my own personal observation and not from the media.

Clever is a word that least describes her.

I assume @Onandoff that you've actually met her and worked with her then?

YADNBU she was given a very hard time and imo would have handled the pandemic far better than Boris has!!

@AnneElliott

I assume *@Onandoff* that you've actually met her and worked with her then?

She didn’t need to. Everything in that post is true and freely available in the public domain.

Well I think it's odd to disagree on someone's else's assessment of cleverness if you haven't met the person you're making pronouncements on!

I've made my judgement as a result of significant interaction over a number of years.

To be fair we all make judgements about our politicians' competence and intelligence without meeting the vast majority of them. They should expect to be evaluated from what they say and do within the public sphere, and I'm afraid Theresa May has not shone in this regard.