Two years on from May's beginning her premiership, there is nothing positive to say about her tenure, and nothing positive to say about her personality.
Going through things chronologically, her time in office is just a catalogue of dysfunctional misrule and doddering mismanagement, in which Britain has suffered through one crisis, scandal or humiliation after another.
The general mood of the country, outside of the wealthy and unencumbered Tory shires, feels like one of weary resignation, where the nation's fate - as "no deal Brexit" - is sliding towards economic, social and moral oblivion. Some people seem to actively welcome it, as a cathartic release. There is a feeling that Britain's social connections are breaking in a thousand small ways every single day; from the collapse of public service provision due to the government's "austerity" drive, to the many disproportionate side-effects this has on vulnerable segments of society such as the poor, disabled, and so on. The knock-on effects to issues like crime are clear.
And much of this rests squarely in the hands of Theresa May, as she is the one who has the power to change this, but chooses not to.
The author has written before about how May's psyche seems to embody many of the pathological neuroses that can be found in Britain's inner world. Autocratic, secretive, paranoid, untrustworthy: these are the words that can summarise Theresa May's style of government. Not to mention the poor judgement and the incompetence.
This catalogue of failure begins with her opening gambit in how she decided to interpret the EU referendum result. While the vote was won by a very narrow margin (4%), she decided to completely embrace the world-view of "leave". In the party conference, "remainers" were derided, and the agenda of UKIP was embraced almost wholesale. In effect, the Conservative Party under Theresa May was transformed into UKIP, leaving the moderate side of the party ignored. For those Conservatives against this lurch to the hard right, it was a case of "like it or or lump it"; as was explained to those in any doubt, it was either support the hard-right vision, or be considered a turncoat. And the ultimate threat used was existential: it was either this way, or allow Jeremy Corbyn to become Prime Minister.
This autocratic atmosphere was clear from the very beginning, when the decision by Theresa May and her "Rasputin" advisor, Nick Timothy to leave the single market and customs union was made, without any consultation with the cabinet. In effect, this course of action set in motion a chain of events that left to the long road of "Hard Brexit", where a deal with the EU was effectively impossible. Her Lancaster House speech in January 2017 cemented that perception, leaving the "Brextremists" delighted, and the moderates in despair.
After already discarding the views of one half of the electorate, and secretively deciding on a course of "Hard Brexit", this was followed up by the decision to invoke Article 50 in March, setting in motion the two-year timeline for exit negotiations.
This error of judgement had already been warned against by the UK's "man in Brussels", Ivan Rogers, who had resigned in the New Year due to his well-sourced advice being ignored. Starting the stopwatch before the government had even had a chance to decide on a proper strategy (let alone before deciding what the government's actual aim outside the EU was) made no sense. It would automatically give the advantage to the EU, as the onus would be on the UK government to decide things with Brussels in that two-year period, or face leaving the EU with no deal. By doing so, Britain's government was shooting itself in the foot, while any threats later made to leave without a deal would be little more than threatening to shoot itself in the head.
But "politics" came first, and May and her advisors decided they knew better. After invoking Article 50, the next judgement that proved to be strategically-calamitous was to call for an early election.
After running the country in the style of an autocratic and secretive "personal rule", May allowed her advisors to create a kind of personality cult around her image.
In hindsight, what was baffling about this was that May was PR-phobic and had no obvious personal charisma - or even, it would appear any real "personality". It would create a personality cult around someone with no personality.
Her advisors, policy head Nick "Rasputin" Timothy and communications head Fiona Hill, had followed her from the Home Office, and ran Downing Street in the same manner. As many critics alleged, it was really these two who were making the key decisions; May seemed to have few ideas of her own, and went along with their judgments, as well as allowing these two abrasive personalities dominate the day-to-day running of the country. Their defenders would argue that as their world-view matched closely with May's, their dominance was simply another manifestation of May's own philosophy; but their detractors could also argue that as their abrasive personal conduct was condoned, it damaged May's own integrity to be so closely connected to them. May also allowed them to make key decisions like writing the upcoming election's manifesto, so it was also May's error to allow such a poorly-conceived manifesto to destroy the trust that people had had in her judgment to that date. Not to mention the fact that she had already ruled out any opportunism in calling an early election on numerous times, so going back on her word while claiming it was somehow the opposition's fault was as bad a piece of dissemination as seen by the worst politicians.
The 2017 election campaign revealed to the public how poorly May was personally equipped to deal with modern politics. In short, her role up to that time had been to be an "anti-modern" politician; essentially a technocrat who was given the trust to "get on with the job", and didn't need to be seen in public. In this way, May's aversion to the personality politics of Cameron was shared by her two advisors, and it was this workmanlike "image" that had been presented for those first ten months as Prime Minister.
As everyone learned during that campaign, May didn't like being seen in public because she didn't know how to deal with the public. She was also intellectually-incapable of thinking on her feet, and that "workmanlike" image that had worked for her before became then satirized as the "Maybot".
In the aftermath of the election, her judgment suffered twice in quick succession, over two different issues. First, losing the party's majority (itself an unprecedented blunder in a snap election) meant that the party relied on the DUP to get votes through parliament. May allowed her government to become allied to a party with its own murky links as well as social views that were anathema on the British mainland; worse, the "deal" with the DUP was effectively "cash for votes", which was the kind of corrupt bargain more usually associated with third world dictatorships (and "pork-barrel" USA).
Second, was her response to the Grenfell disaster, where her cack-handed manner of dealing with the event led even some of her supporters into throes of yet more despair.
Before the 2017 election, May's government had been ruled in large part by the autocratic pairing of Timothy and Hill. After her two key advisors were fired as the condition for her party allowing May to continue, May's government has been ruled in large part by stasis.
The Grenfell disaster was simply the first of many physical signs of the malaise that seemed to embody May's administration and her personal style. By the autumn, the "MeToo" movement reached Westminster, revealing to the public the chauvinistic and boorish culture that had been prevalent since time immemorial. Then sackings of two ministers over their sexist conduct seemed to open the floodgates to other sackings or resignations for various reasons that have gone on since then, with a rate of political attrition since last autumn that is more common to that found in unstable Latin American administrations. Meanwhile, the "optics" of seeing the Palace Of Westminster in scaffolding seems to mirror the shambolic internal goings-on, where the facade of functioning government is only just barely maintained.
The collapse of Carillion highlighted the "Ponzi scheme" structure that seems typical in public sector service providers, while the fate of the "Windrush generation" highlighted the immorality at the heart of Theresa May's "hostile environment". And while ministers might be changed, the policies themselves are barely touched. This is without even mentioning "austerity", whose effects are so vast on the public sector it's barely possible to know where to begin. Just to give one example, many local councils have had their budgets cut by 40%, while other services like the police, prisons, and others have had similarly life-changing cuts to their budgets.
With May, there is a facade of humanity where she pretends to show empathy for the plight of those her government's policies have affected, but once attention has turned, to use one of May's famous quotes, "nothing has changed". There is no sign that she's affected by the innumerable anecdotes of what her government's policies are doing to society, as her government's strategy is unchanged.
The sense of stasis under May's watch is caused in part by her (mis)handling of Brexit, which it seems has consumed the government's attention from almost any other issue, so the feeling of the country literally going to rack and ruin is very real. But what's even worse is that May's strategy since invoking Article 50 has been to avoid making any kind of coherent government plan, as this might provoke a crisis in the parliamentary party. The only offering of any substance until the Chequers white paper the other week was May's Florence speech last September, which, beyond saying what it ruled out (such reiterating leaving the single market and customs union), offered nothing coherent and instead presented yet more nonsensical "cakism".
The latest offering - the Chequers white paper - neatly embodies all that is wrong with May's style of government, and how she has learned nothing in her two years as Prime Minister. She is still in "dictatorial" mode, like she was from the very beginning with her unilateral decision over leaving the single market and customs union. This "white paper" was an incoherent "compromise" between the wishes of both sides of the party, that was created unilaterally by her and her close advisors in secret, thrust on to the cabinet without warning, were lied to about its contents beforehand, and were all then blackmailed in agreeing to it. What's not to like, eh? This behaviour soon caused the resignation of three ministers, has since been decried by both wings of the party, with the white paper being rejected by the EU in any case. The "Brextremists" then forced the government into accepting several amendments to the white paper that make a "no deal" scenario all the more likely than ever.
Two years on, Theresa May's premiership has achieved precisely nothing. Her time in government, and in regards to Brexit, has achieved as much as if there had been no government in charge at all. The only "achievements" she could point to are invoking article 50 and declaring Britain's objective to leave the single market and the customs union, and anyone with a pulse could have done that. The fact that both those decisions actually were strategically idiotic tells you everything.
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