Theresa May’s speech at this week’s Conservative Party conference in Manchester, England, was meant to be the high point of the three-day event. Instead, her speech Wednesday morning became an extended and excruciating fiasco. None of this was May’s fault. It was just her bad luck. But luck is the commodity without which a political career cannot survive.
Fortune favors the brave, they say. It was unfortunate that May contracted a cold in the days before the conference. On the morning of her speech, she tweeted a photograph of a selection of cough medications next to the iconic red box in which ministers carry the day’s Cabinet papers. The message was that she was brave: Keep calm and carry on sucking the lozenges.
The auguries were not good. On the eve of the conference, her foreign secretary Boris Johnson had tried to upstage her yet again. For the second time in a month, Johnson had publicly announced his terms for a Brexit deal just as May was about to make a formal statement on the same theme. On Tuesday, when the media received the alleged highlights of May’s speech, it seemed that her speechwriters had plagiarized one of her gems from a fictional U.S. president, Josiah Bartlett of The West Wing.
May took the stage late, delivered a short coughing fit, and apologized for throwing away her Commons’ majority in last May’s election. For the next 20 minutes, she made her pitch for the “British Dream.” And then disaster struck.
“Prime minister, prime minister,” a man said as he mounted the stage. He wore the work shirt, glasses, and blue tie of a young messenger from Conservative Central Office—or central casting.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but Boris asked me to give you this.” He gave May a P45, the official form for firing an employee.
May kept talking, but she accepted the paper. Unless she dons a clown costume before the perp walk of leaving office, this may be the defining image of her premiership. That, and the image of her Cabinet, sitting complacent and complicit in the front row.
The man was Simon Brodkin. He is a professional prankster—not at all like May, whose comedy tends toward the amateurish and inadvertent, but closer to Boris Johnson. Very close, in fact. For, as May croaked onward, Brodkin climbed down and gave Johnson the thumbs up.
“Boris,” he said, extending his hand, as the cameras clicked. “Job done!”
“Get lost,” Johnson hinted. “Go away!”
“I gave Teresa her P45 just like you asked,” Brodkin tweeted after being manhandled from the hall. The police released him later in the day without charge. After all, the Conservative Party had given him accreditation for the conference, and he had said only what everyone else is thinking.
In 2014, Brodkin tricked his way onto the television talent show Britain’s Got Talent by pretending to be a Hasidic rapper named Steven Goldblatt, and then won through the early rounds with an inept patriotic rap called “Red, White, and Blue.” In 2016, when FIFA was navitgating allegations of massive corruption, Brodkin interrupted a speech by FIFA president Sepp Blatter. He threw a large handful for $100 bills over Blatter’s head—payment, he said, for staging the 2026 World Cup in North Korea.
Brodkin is a skilled performance artist. Teresa May is not. She put the P45 down on the floor, where it was photographed by a journalist. The reasons for her dismissal were “Neither strong nor stable,” and “We’re a bit worried about Jezza”— referring to the slogan under which May campaigned to electoral disaster last May, and to the rising popularity of Labour’s hard-left Jeremy Corbyn. Boris Johnson’s mock signature was appended to the foot of the P45.
Brodkin only had to sustain his imposture for one morning. May is trapped within a never-ending impersonation of a leader. Helplessly, her voice cracking, she kept talking about her policies—until a series of coughing fits waylaid her entirely. The chancellor, Philip Hammond, stepped up—not to take her job, but to offer a cough drop. Hammond’s manner is so smooth as to be oleaginous. Like May, he was against Brexit before he was for it, sort of.
This was another image suggesting that May, lacking strength and stability, is dependent on the kindness of her chief ministers. Mrs. Thatcher, one feels, would have pre-empted such a scene by carrying some linctus in her handbag. If, that is, she had permitted herself to cough at all. You make your own luck.
Short of May coughing up blood like John Keats, or taking a flyer into the front row like Kurt Cobain, or being chased around by Boris Johnson to the Benny Hill theme, what more could have gone wrong?
Well, the scenery started to fall apart.
“Building a country that works for everyone,” was the slogan on the blue backdrop behind May. As she wheezed on about building houses on the postage-stamp sized areas of England that still have grass and trees, the letters started to fall off the backdrop. In the end, the slogan accurately reflected the incoherence and sloppiness of May’s party:
BUI_DING
A C_ _ NTRYTHA_ _ORKS _OR _ _ _RYON_ At the end of the speech, May’s husband ran onto the stage and embraced her as if she had just been recovered from a shipwreck. But there is no recovery from this sort of amateurism. It was unfortunate that May was ill. It looks like carelessness for the party to have given security clearance to a serial prankster. What, for instance, might have happened if May had been confronted with something more dangerous than ridicule and a piece of paper? It was even more careless of May to leave the P45 on the stage for the media, and to require the donation of a politically loaded cough drop from Philip Hammond. It was absurd to talk of building new homes when the Conservative party appear demonstrably unable to construct a stage set.
“The only sure thing about luck,” Bret Harte wrote in The Outcasts of Poker Flat (1869), “is that it will change.” May was doubly lucky to reach 10 Downing Street at all. First, the surprise result of the Brexit referendum in June 2016 forced David Cameron to resign. Then, Boris Johnson, Cameron’s expected heir, was tripped up by his fellow Brexiteer Michael Gove. That allowed May, despite having opposed Brexit, to emerge as the consensus candidate. She was third-time lucky last May, when she retained office, if not power, after thoroughly bungling her election strategy. And now her lucky streak has ended.
The prime minister is an unprofessional gambler, but she cannot leave with her winnings. She staked her credibility, and the party’s patience, on her conference speech. If the cards had fallen her way on Wednesday, she might have demonstrated her competence as party leader, and trumped Jeremy Corbyn’s appeal to the overstretched and overtaxed middle classes. That might have dissuaded Boris Johnson from further bluffing. It might even have forced Johnson to show his hand, and lose his seat at the Cabinet table—a reversal that would complicate his route to No. 10.
Instead, May is falling out of the game, an amateur turned into a laughingstock by a professional comic. Instead of turning her luck around, she endured the most disastrous Conservative conference speech in living memory. This morning, the whispering chorus of disappointed Conservatives spoke clearly, and even gave its name. An ex-minister, Ed Vaizey, to whom May gave a P45 in 2015, was the first to break ranks.
“I think there will be quite a few people who will now be pretty firmly of the view that she should resign,” Vaizey told BBC Radio Oxford. The pro-Brexit minister Michael Gove, damning with faint praise, said that May was “at the top of her game.”
By lunchtime, the Telegraph was claiming that some thirty Conservative MPs were planning to give May an ultimatum to resign by Christmas. Under party rules, a formal leadership contest can be triggered with 48signatures. Today, that number no longer seems far off. May faces a long haul to Christmas, and the possibility of a P45 under the tree.
May’s lucky streak is long over. She no longer rules her party, and she has failed to lead her country. The coughing and spluttering, the inability to make a point in a clear voice, are all too accurate as metaphors for her failure to articulate a vision and work towards it.
“Luck and temper rule the world,” La Rochefoucauld wrote in 1665. The luck of Boris Johnson is the temperament of Boris Johnson. By wit, bombast, and a refusal to be stopped, Johnson has made his own luck, good and bad. Does he have the temperament to take May’s job without giving the appearance of seizing power? Either way, it is Britain’s bad luck that as Britain enters its most important negotiations since 1945, the Conservatives, the party that are supposed to be the default party of British government, are falling apart.
