In some circumstances that might make her quite a good leader of a country. Worthy but dull works quite well for Angela Merkel. In a world where Donald Trump proves by the hour how dangerous it is to have a leader who is an interesting liar there is a lot to be said for being a reliable plodder.
Unfortunately, the circumstances that May finds herself in can’t be dealt with by steady hard work and a determination to make the best of a bad thing. May likes to weigh up a situation and calculate all the odds and then try and come to the decision that makes most sense in her narrow vision of the world. She doesn’t do thinking on her feet any more than she does dancing on them.
So she is ploughing on with the task of trying to find a way to make Brexit work with steady determination and expecting her troops to see the sense of the calculations she has made and loyally fall in behind her efforts to unite her party and find a way forward that she thinks might not be too bad.
That is why she has been in Africa. In the warped logic of Brexit the UK is supposed to leave the EU, cope with new restrictions on trading with our biggest customer, but prosper by striking great deals with rapidly growing new economies in places like Africa.
Unfortunately, 45% of UK imports go to the EU. Not a single African country figures in the top 10 nations receiving our exports and the value of exports to the entire continent is less than one tenth of the value of exports to the EU. May is therefore desperately trying to make the UK better at trading in a small but growing market whilst making it worse at trading in a huge one. She’s also missing the small problem that the UK isn’t always fully trusted in places where it used to be the colonial power. Oh, and hoping that people will be grateful to see humanitarian aid cancelled and aid linked to trade taking its place.
As a strategy for making the best of a bad thing this might make sense to her. As a way of illustrating to her own party that she has bought in to the Brexit fantasy of wonderful new trade deals she might also think that it makes some kind of sense. As a way forward for a country with a trade deficit in goods and services trading which was £8,581 million in the last 3 months alone it is a disaster.
What is needed right now is a steely determination to face down ideologues on the far right of the Conservative Party and promote the national interest. May is surrounded by public school bullies who are looking out for their own interests and are quite prepared to keep telling Brexit enthusiasts what they want to hear regardless of the damage it might do to the country. Trying to strike a compromise with such people and going along with their vision of the future will never work. They will always demand more than she can deliver. They will never be satisfied. They will always be able to outflank her and stir up enthusiasm for the promised land of Brexit which they persuaded so many people to believe in.
There are a lot of people out there who bought into the dream that with one bound Brexit will fix all our problems and it is easy to mobilise those people against any PM who fails to deliver the quick and wonderful solution they still want and expect.
There are also a lot of folk out there who were prepared to give Brexit a go in case it delivered some of the good things that were promised but aren’t keen on anything that hurts the country. As it becomes clear with every passing day that life is more complex than politicians promises those people are starting to gradually lose faith. In those circumstances the right thing to do in the national interest is to recognise that we are in a huge mess and call the whole thing off by organising a second referendum.
May has instead staked her future on the idea that people will settle for the least damaging Brexit she can squeeze past the far right of her party. She has settled for the option of trying to sell us all some kind of cobbled together low damage solution. “Follow me to the barricades - I think I can offer you something that isn’t that bad”.
Such a message inspires no one and so she gets weaker day by day. Instead of facing down her enemies she keeps trying to placate them. Even to the point of announcing that a no deal Brexit won’t be a complete disaster despite the utter lack of professionalism of the preparation for it (see my last blog).
When her party returns from its summer break it is hard to see it uniting behind her strong and stable leadership. Some of us warned at the time of the referendum that the UK would end up taking rules from Brussels without having any say about what those rules would be. Few of us thought that a Conservative Prime Minister would have to try and sell that to a hostile party conference a little over 6 months before we are due to leave. Or that crashing out without a deal would become a serious probability.
Dancing clearly isn’t Theresa May’s thing. Neither is leading a country.