The Glass Cliff

[Upzadaizy]

Is what's happened to Theresa May. It's a perfect example of Michelle Ryan's model: woman brought in to organisation in crisis.

I have to admit that I do have a tiny skerrick of sympathy for her. Particularly as she's saved us from Boris Johnson as Prime Minister - or Jeremy Corbyn for that matter.

I had to vote with my head rather than my heart yesterday, and go for the party which defines women as non-men.

What's my penance?

Well none of the shit has gone away in the meantime so let's see if Andrea Leadsome runs and the male candidates fall away again.

I don't disagree with you OP, but she didn't HAVE to step up and fight for the job.

Not quite true, she didn't win the general election, Conservatives didn't get a majority.

She didn’t need to. That’s not how elections work. Same with Hilary Clinton’s ‘popular vote’. There’s no such thing as a moral victory; you win an election or you lose.

The post-referendum premiership was always going to be a Kobyashi Maru but those who dodged the bullet didn’t give the job to May because she was a woman; they just wanted it to go to anyone but themselves. Boris Johnson would far more have preferred Jacob Rees-Mogg went down in flames, and vis-versa.

She’s been a lousy Prime Minister but I have to feel sorry for how personal some of the abuse has been. Who gives a shit if she can’t dance? And how was she supposed to answer the question about the naughtiest thing she ever did? Say she slashed a horse for kicks or threw a bag of puppies in the canal?

She did win the general election she just didn’t win a majority. Fair enough if you want to point that out but it doesn’t change the fact the Tories got the most votes of any party.

But she called the election with everyone saying she was going to win a landslide, and the opposite happened, she lost the small majority she did have.

Agreed but it wasn’t necessarily a bad decision at the time she called it. Several things occurred some of which she had no control over. We had the Manchester bombing and London Bridge attacks which put into focus the cuts to police budgets, and although anti-terrorism funding had been going up the optics were terrible. The choice she DID have that was a cock up of epic proportions was the Conservative manifesto which was badly written and the whole dementia tax element was a colossal own goal.

I’m also not going to defend her Brexit policy as that was mismanaged from start to finish. However my take on her premiership is she was a competent leader in extremely rough circumstances.

I hope history is kinder to her, as others have pointed out the real culprit in all this was David Cameron and his calling the referendum in the first place.

She did kind of go off half-cocked by invoking Article 50 before figuring out what kind of terms we wanted to try to leave on.

That was her biggest mistake, Grimbles. She should have got all-party agreement as to what Brexit involved (given Cameron couldn't be arsed to figure that out) before invoking Article 50. Unforgivable - both of them.

In 2026 bere was a lot of discussion about the party leadership being a glass cliff, it was the first time I'd heard the term. But she'd been talked about as asuccessor for Cameron for quite some time. Don't think things have got any better in the meantime though so will be 'interesting' to see who goes for it.

Fuck, drunk typing.

2016 there

You are not as drunk as Theresa May is right now!

So glad I’m not the only one to think this! I despise the Tories with all my heart so it’s a very unnatural feeling for me to have empathy with a Tory PM but in Theresa May’s case, it has made my feminist senses go into five-alarm fire mode to see how every deal she has made with the EU has been rubbished by smirking male MPs who know how impossible her job is and are enjoying watching her fail.

I have seen that same scenario happen at work so many times: promote the woman into an impossible job, sit back and smirk as she tries hard to make it work, then fire her when she fails and say, ‘see? That’s what happens when you promote women’.

But whoever is next inherits an even worse situation. So I guess by OP's logic we'll get Andrea Leadsom 🙈

Isn't it pretty insulting to suggest that this woman didn't get to the top of politics on her merits, but was put there by men?

She's a tough capable politician who picked up a shit show from the previous limp leader.

I don't like a lot about her but I can't see how anyone could have done much better particually with Corbyn about

Deydodo: Disagree. A couple of calibre men wanted the job. She won the leadership election on merit against Gove, who will probably be in the running next time

I heard Gove's speech in which he withdrew from the running for PM in 2016: Radio 4 Today programme played it, I think. It was a completely disingenuous 'I don't have the qualities it takes to be PM' speech. Absolutely clear that he was backing swiftly away from a disaster. It will be interesting to see how he swerves it if he decides he does have the qualities required to be PM this year.

Whoops: Gove's speech was played yesterday, so I'm not relying on a two-year-old memory.

Completely agree OP. I said it when she got the job (and when the two front-runners for the job were both women). Glass cliff, or waterfall, as I called it.

It's textbook.

Isn't it pretty insulting to suggest that this woman didn't get to the top of politics on her merits, but was put there by men?

Oh, that wasn't my implication. The original research on this didn't really generalise about women being "put" in leadership positions by men.

Here's the Wikipedia (sorry) summary of the phenomenon:
Glass cliff

I remember when she gained the job and there was a thread on here about the glass cliff with many posters predicting she'd be gone within months.
The next PM will still have a glass cliff position, so I guess none of the men will want the job and they'll sacrifice another woman again.

I don't think the next PM does have a hard a job, actually.

We've gone from Brexiteers arguing Brexit will be great, more NHS money, border controls, no issue in NI/Irish border, no interruption to supply chains, international trade, etc etc. To now everyone accepting that there is a significant risk of medicine being unaccessible, supermarkets having empty shelves, riots and murders again in NI, motorways turned into lorry parks near the docks, staff shortages, etc.

We've become desensitised to the worst-case scenario, so even if it happens when the next (male) PM is in office, a) people were half expecting it so hey won't cop as much flack, and b) he'll just blame Theresa May anyway.