The dark charisma of Boris Johnson: how to "gaslight" an electorate

Britain has had more than 100,000 deaths from the Coronavirus, one of the highest rates in the world. Japan, another highly-developed country that is also an island, has had a little over 5,000 deaths due to Covid-19.

Under normal circumstances, you would expect the electorate to punish their government for such an appalling number of avoidable deaths. But in the UK, these are not normal circumstances, because Boris Johnson is charge and nothing is ever his fault.

How is it possible for the head of the government to not be held to account for 100,000 deaths? Does Boris Johnson possess some kind of magical superpower that allows him to avoid blame? Is it some kind of psychological "trick"?

On closer inspection, it seems that, indeed, it is some kind of psychological sleight of hand. Not only is Johnson able to avoid blame, but he is able to transfer that blame on to the victims of his own actions. 

The government have been blaming the public for the number of deaths from Covid for a while now, but now that has gone into overdrive with the government's newest extremely graphic scare tactic. 

Power without consequences

Let's remind ourselves how we got to this point. 

The government, headed by Boris Johnson, has, from the very beginning of the pandemic, consistently refused to use effective border controls to limit the spread of the infection into the country. This approach is almost unique in the world.

Boris Johnson then was late in implementing a national lockdown, by which point the virus had spread widely across the country. This tendency to delay the decision-making process has been a consistent and entirely avoidable pattern in Johnson's behaviour during the pandemic.

He then allowed Covid patients to be sent from hospitals to care homes, adding to the deaths the elderly and vulnerable. The NHS was left to struggle without any clear or consistent direction from government.

He told people to go to work in unsafe conditions (this is still true now, as the government does not enforce health and safety regulations in workplaces, while the NHS, and retail and hospitality sectors in particular, have had to work in poorly ventilated workplaces while dealing with large numbers of the public). 

It should also be made clear that many of the poorest in society are still going to work in unsafe conditions because they simply have no financial alternative; they are ineligible for any government support, so they have to simply choose between having enough money to feed themselves or the risk of becoming infected with the virus while at work. Many others are simply unable to get government financial help and no longer have any work at all, so are suffering in other ways.

When lockdown was eased in May, over the following months through till the winter, the government introduced a bewildering array of ever-changing rules that the public were somehow expected to follow.

At the same time the government encouraged people to socialise with others in the "Eat Out To Help Out" campaign, aimed at financially subsidizing the hospitality industry. This was later shown to have a significant effect on spreading the virus around the community.

Boris Johnson then encouraged people to meet others at Christmas time, being a significant factor in causing the dramatic second "spike" in deaths we are seeing now.

Boris Johnson claims to accept "responsibility" for the calamity that his decision-making (or lack of it) has created, while at the same time leading the public to believe it is their fault for the virus spreading.

With the undoubted success story that is the vaccine programme now taking precedence, it looks for all the world that Johnson will, as he has many times in the past, "get away with it". But the 100,000 deaths are a result of his decisions in government, and his government's decisions. Thus is the nature of power - that actions in government have consequences; in this case, 100,000 real consequences.

He will most likely escape blame, as he has before. This is the strange power he has on others - his magical ability to transfer blame to others, using his "lovable rogue" character to make people always want to give him the benefit of the doubt. He will lie again and again, and yet people still choose to believe him.

The blame game

Is there something uniquely-hypnotic about the effect Johnson's personality has on the electorate? His "superpower", if we can call it that, is to gaslight the nation; to lie, manipulate and disarm others with his persona - the "charismatic oaf" that the people will always forgive and excuse, allowing themselves to believe that it was really their own fault that 100,000 people died, for it couldn't possibly be the fault of Boris Johnson. 

After all, he is just the head of government, and the government isn't responsible for anything, is it? 

A last word about the media, who have been Boris Johnson's enablers for the past twenty years. Somehow, Johnson fits into their stereotype of being "one of us": as a former journalist (along with Michael Gove), Johnson has been charming his way in the right circles for years, his various mess-ups and controversies only adding to his fascination. 

In the media, The Daily Telegraph is effectively his own personal propaganda machine, with the Express and Daily Mail almost just as fawning. The same can be said for The Sun and The Times, who can always be relied upon to provide a sympathetic telling of Johnson's agenda. This covers the vast majority of the media that the electorate consume; the left-wing media here are sadly barely worth mentioning in terms of their actual influence on the psychology of the electorate; the populist press have the advantage of patronage and government connections in the influence on the electorate.

So Johnson, for all his failings, is likely to be secure in his position as "national saviour" for quite a while longer. This blogger did at one point think his days at the political pinnacle were numbered, but he seems to have ridden in perennial luck and come out of it with barely a scratch to his reputation.

On current trends, he may well even win the next election, if the Brexit calamity can be blamed on the EU and an unprepared business sector as well as 100,000 deaths have been blamed on his own electorate.

Brexit psychology: the victory of delusion

"Brexit" is an idea based on delusions, both paranoid and fantastical.

The crowd that gathered in Parliament Square to celebrate "Brexit" at eleven o'clock on the 31st January were celebrating the victory of their own delusions. They were "free". They were free from European oppression.
What "victory" had they won? As summarized brilliantly by Tom Peck in the linked article above "what makes Britain’s independence day different from most, though not all, that have gone before it is that its prize is a freedom nobody else wants". Britain has become "the first country to throw off the yoke of an oppressor whom nobody else considers themselves oppressed by. We have won our freedom from our own imagined nightmares. We have liberated ourselves from the terrors of the monster under the bed that was never there. We are the children that never grew up"

Brexiteers have won freedom from their own imagined nightmares. Britain has freed itself from the invisible monster. St George has slayed the dragon that never existed. England is a country at war with its own shadow, a dog chasing its own tail.
You get the picture.

In Britain leaving the EU, the EU has also lost a valuable member. As Ian Dunt says "Britain joined late, but when it did it brought something unique: a caution which is needed in any grand project. That detachment is now portrayed as a sign that Britain never fitted in. It's nonsense. Any number of European states, except for perhaps Germany, could have succumbed to jingoistic populism. We were just the only ones stupid enough to hold a referendum on it. Britain's careful approach to Europe suited it and provided something valuable to the manner in which the project evolved"

One of the EU's missed opportunities was that Britain's involvement could have been used to rein in the political urge to continually crave for more and more "more Europe", with political decisions based on pragmatisn rather than ideology. Instead, we have had the UK as a EU member whose perspective was too often under-utilized, by itself as well as other member-states. Now Britain has left, its internal politics intoxicated by its own delusions, and the rest of the EU faces a populist insurgency slowly eating itself from the inside out.


Paranoid delusions

Those Brexiteer delusions mentioned earlier have been there for decades. There is a recurring sense that these are people who could only be happy if they have an enemy, even if it is one that is entirely illusory. George Orwell said a thing or two about that in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it's a psychological trick that politicians have used down the ages. Technological advances have allowed them to refine their techniques, and the rise of populist rhetoric has seen the resurgence of that old chestnut, "the other". It can be any "other", as long as it can be used to take the blame.

What makes it different today is the use of "plausible deniability" by the populist leaders whenever their acolytes use that rhetoric to project harm. There's always the "nod and a wink" about populist rhetoric, from Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and all the others. If far-right violence and hate crimes are increasing, it's because of provocations from the other side, never from theirs ("there was blame on both sides" etc.). They are always "isolated incidents", except when highlighted to show how liberal society is failing. You can never argue against their rationalizing of violence, because they don't use rational arguments. 
The rhetoric of division serves a purpose - to provide an "other" to aim their frusatrations at, whether it be foreign plots (the EU's "agenda") or fear of loss of culture (immigration). With Brexit, the emotive argument used has been that Britain has been "humiliated" countless times over the decades by Europe, and more generally "held back" from fulfilling its greatness. 
While it's true that joining the EEC was originally a decicion based on the changing global strategic situation, the kind of "deal" that Britain has got out of it over the decades has been one that has involved various "opt outs" compared to other member-states (on Schengen, the social chapter, the rebate, the Euro etc.); in fact either proving Britain's more advantageous "exceptional" status with the bloc, or the ability of Britain to get more than should deserve. Either way, to other European countries, Britain's complaint of "bullying" by the EU looks like the complaints of a country with a dire lack of self-awareness.

The British print media have much to blame for this sense of eternal paranoia, or "Europhobia". The culture of pychologically equating "Europe" with the Second World War - also thanks to films and TV series - has led to Britain, and England in particular, with a sense of greivance against "Europe" totally out kilter with reality. The sense of the EU being a co-operative project is lost to them, with "Europe" used by David Cameron when it was necessary to prove his Eurosceptic credentials to the hardliners in his own party. The EU became the "whipping boy" of the British psyche, which ended with Cameron being eaten by the monster he couldn't stop feeding.
By the time of the referendum, the EU was being blamed for almost everything possible: from illegal immigration from the Middle East and Africa, to the closing down of factories in the North-east of England. Nothing was the fault of Britain's own government, if it could be conveniently blamed on the EU. 


Fantastical delusions

Similarly, Brexit supporters often sound like they ought to be sci-fi/fantasy aficionados. The vision they have of Britain outside the EU is one where Britain is able to transcend global rules and norms. 

In the same way that they fantastically blame the EU for holding Britain back for decades, they claim that "Britannia Unchained" can become a 21st century buccaneer: using language more commonly found in sci-fi fandom, they claim that Britain can be a pioneer in the tech industry (as though no other country has thought of it before), or can become a "supercharged" leader in space technology, for example. Why not build a Britain space fleet to colonize other planets, for that matter? Money is no object to them. No ambition seems too fantastical to hold.

Likewise, Brexiteers live in a world of 21st century make-believe; a fantasy realm where borders are frictionless even though there are no agreements in place to allow it. The Britain they imagine is one where the geographical reality of the country's berth right next to Europe is forgotten; instead of it being mere practical, financial and logistical sense to do the bulk of our trade with our neighbours, Britain should be imagined as a country where it is as logistically simple to trade with Australia as it is with Austria. 
Britain, in their eyes, is not tethered to Europe by geography at all, but is in effect a giant floating island, like "Laputa" in Gulliver's Travels, able to move around the world and trade with whom it wishes at will.  

All this is imagined because of emotional ties to the past. If these fantastical delusions are not permitted to happen, then it is the fault of Europe, or a conspiracy to "do down" Britain from within. Then the paranoid delusions take over to cloak the fantastical nature of their imaginations. These people are, emotionally-speaking, mere children in adult bodies. 

Brexit Britain is a country fuelled by the infantile instincts of a nation that has yet to grow up. Boris Johnson is, in this sense, the leader to a cult of age-regression.

Boris Johnson: the personality cult and "national saviour" narrative

After Boris Johnson’s first appearance at the House of Commons as Prime Minister, his general approach was dismissed by the opposition as “incoherent optimism”. This is as accurate a description of Johnson’s “free jazz” approach to dialogue as you may get, but at the same time, it exemplifies the problem that conventional parties have to tackling Populism as a whole. They cannot counter appeals to emotion with references to facts; it is an approach doomed to failure, for it misses the point. They do not understand the nature of what they are up against.

Johnson’s appeals to emotion are typical to Populism, with the important distinction that Johnson became London mayor eleven years ago using the same charismatic,maverick approach several years before Populism became a wider force in the world. It should also be mentioned that Johnson’s predecessor at the mayoralty, Ken Livingstone, used his own charismatic (left-wing) style to great success for eight years.

Love versus fear

Johnson has been compared to Trump many times before for obvious reasons, but there are also important personality differences worth mentioning too, and these affect their political style in important ways. The two men may well be Populists, but they are Populists of their own mould. Both men are narcissistic and charismatic,reckless and unprincipled. Both men have used their force of will to attain personal success by breaking conventions and engaging in amoral behaviour. And yet, although their careers have both fluctuated over the decades, they were always in an ultimately upward trajectory, until they reached the absolute pinnacle of power.

What is different about Johnson and Trump is what motivates them beyond the self-evident narcissism. Trump’s motivation stems from the instincts of a businessman. He is a swindler with the approach to ethics as straight-laced as a mafia don, and although he clearly loves attention, he doesn’t seem to mind what kind of attention it is; bad publicity is still publicity, after all. This indicates a very high (and very skewed) sense of omnipotence.

In this sense, Trump is the kind of narcissist that doesn’t care if few people love him or like him, as long as people respect him. He may be a difficult person to love, but a much easier person to respect; and he seems to have earned a kind of grudging respect even from enemies that hate him. If you can’t be loved, then at least be feared: this seems to be his “mafia don” mentality that he applied first to business, and now to politics.

Johnson’s narcissism, on the other hand, seems to stem from an innate need to be loved. Playing the buffoon and the clown simply for people’s laughs (and therefore affection) has been his singular style since becoming involved in politics.While he is by nature academically-bright and sharp-witted, his public persona has been to play the jester. 

This also explains why Johnson’s rhetorical style is subtly different from Trump’s. To borrow the phrase used at the start, compared to Johnson, Trump’s rhetorical style is more “angry incoherence” compared to Boris’ “incoherent optimism”. Boris wants to make people feel good, so that they will feel good about him. His use of high-flown rhetoric and pseudo-Churchillian prose are a strategic act and a psychological ploy. It is also clear that he is at his most comfortable when in this role, such as when inspiring Londoners during the Olympics or extolling Britain’s future prospects during the referendum campaign. With the oncoming event of Brexit, he is in the role of national leader continuing in the same motivational manner, exhorting others to combine with him in a collective spirit, and scolding the opposition for sowing doubt and disharmony.

The cult of Boris

Of course, by embracing such a faith-based belief system, the reality of Brexit hardly seems to matter to him. Boris has turned Britain into the archetypal personality cult, with him as its charismatic leader. This is where Nigel Farage and Johnson share the same instincts: they are both “Pied Pipers”, and along with Donald Trump, are an Anglo-Saxon Triumvirate of Populism.

In this way, Boris’ message is both dangerously seductive and terrifyingly simplistic. He has turned Brexit from an ideological “death cult” to an esoteric “sex cult”: his persona provides a motivational “force of nature” that infatuates the nation, making them love him for making them love themselves and love their country. The negative energy, and the anger and depression that Theresa May’s ghoulish tenure generated has been transformed by Boris into a kind of orgiastic national hero-worship.

It may still be Brexit “do or die”, but Boris’ rhetoric ability is to make it seductive regardless, and to make people love him for it in the process. To any right-thinking person, Brexit may well be a disaster, but to Boris’ supporters, it will still be a glorious disaster. Boris’ ability to channel all the stereotypical national myths into an evocative “Brexit” narrative is the spell that his supporters don’t want to end. Such a narrative would be even difficult for agnostic parts of the electorate to ignore. After all, it worked three years ago, so why not now, at its most pivotal moment?

The signs are that the anger that Farage channeled through his “Brexit Party” is now being dissipated by Boris’ singular rhetoric; his purple prose transforming the “betrayal” narrative into a narrative of national salvation. Boris’ emotive and bombastic talk in the House of Commons on his first full day in power left the opposition not only confounded but also dejected. As said earlier, they simply lack the political tools to know how to deal with it. The only answer is for them to find their own emotive narrative to fight back against Boris with, but they are too divided and lacking in a clear direction to know where this would come from.

This is why there is a temptation to go along with the “national destiny” narrative: that Boris, from a young age, was destined for greatness, regardless of his reckless and unconventional nature. The Churchill parallels are well-known, as well as knowingly well-versed by Johnson himself. Clearly, he has long been fascinated by the wartime leader, seeing the man’s ups and downs and long-winded career (and unstable upbringing) reflected in his own. Churchill was a deeply-complex (and often maddening) character, and his long career before 1940 was largely famed for its infamy, in spite of its longevity. Like Boris, the people that most liked Churchill didn’t know him; they only loved the myth. While charismatic, he could as easily be horrendous company. It was only the Second World War that rectified his reputation; so now, the man on the British five pound note is only remembered for his exploits during a five year period of war. The charlatan and drunk he was known as before has been forgotten.

Doubtless, Boris has similar hopes of national “immortality”. If he can get his government through Brexit, then his hope is that he stays in power for long enough that people will remember him for being the charismatic blonde-mopped icon in power at a time of adversity and national change and will have forgotten about any of the trauma and hardships (he created) that went with it.

Given his luck, he may well pull it off.

Theresa May's personality: an "anti-social" Prime Minister?

The motivations of Theresa May can be distilled down to her relationship to the Conservative Party, which has been with her from a young age. In this way, her role as leader of the country is really about her masking her inner inclinations towards the protecting the interest of her party. She is a product of her conservative background, and a dutiful servant of the Conservative Party.

These deep-set motivations explain her reasons for embracing the meaning of Brexit after the EU referendum. This allowed her to discard the "mask" she wore as part of Cameron's more centrist liberalism, and also explained her evident glee in sending George Osborne into parliamentary exile. She was able to express her reactionary, parochial instincts more freely under the cover of respecting the Brexit vote.

More tellingly, once she became Prime Minister, the more neurotic "quirks" of her personality became public knowledge.
As Home Secretary, she was known to protect her privacy fiercely, but as someone to work with, she was known to be secretive and rely on only a few loyalists (Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill in particular). One of the traits she had that became so useful to David Cameron was her reliability to master a "brief" i.e. to loyally repeat the "agreed" line. This was one of main things that accounted for her longevity at the Home Office.
Indeed, it could even be argued that the Home Office is continuing her work even after she has left it, leaving the official Home Secretary's role to often act as little more than a spokesperson for May's own strategy. In other words, Theresa May still seems in effective charge of Home Office strategy, leaving the Home Secretary to have little control over what the department's officials decide; the officials seem to be simply following the same strategy that May had when she was at the Home Office, regardless of what her successors might think. With Theresa May, Home Office strategy seems to be run almost directly by the Prime Minister.
To be fair, this isn't a new phenomenon, though: when Gordon Brown took over as Prime Minister after being head of the Treasury for so long, it was well-known that his successor at 11 Downing Street had similar issues as Chancellor. But the fact the Home Office's persistence with policies that have even been criticized by the Home Secretary himself, suggests that May's psychological impact has been to turn the Home Office's staff into her personal "minions" (or "flying monkeys", if you prefer). The Home Secretary doesn't even control what goes on in his own ministry.


Interactions with the social environment

As Prime Minister, her ability to "master" a brief has since become a point of satire: turning her into the "Maybot", incapable of answering a question in any other way than the one she has learned, and equally unable to coherently answer a question that she hasn't been given advance warning about. When these things do happen, the result is as cringe-worthy as it is ridiculous.
At the other extreme, this has frequently led her to answer questions in a way that resembles crazy-making semantic nonsense. While politicians are famous for "dissemination", May's method to "not answer a question" is almost unparalleled, forming sentences and entire speeches often entirely absent of meaning. Speeches that she has given at times resemble "Vogon poetry" recitals, making them almost physically-painful to endure. You wonder if this is actually intentional; by discouraging media appearances by making them so awful to listen to, she succeeds in reducing the need to speak in public to a bare minimum.
In this way, her naturally-insular instincts allow her to rule from the bunker, unseen like an enigmatic arm-chair general. This has provided yet more satirical material, of course, but in the real world where real answers to problems are needed, her semantic nonsense has driven those that need to make actual strategic decisions to the point of madness.

That being said, while her instincts have seemed to be to reduce her public speaking engagements as much as possible, in recent months, the ever-more-chaotic turn of events (caused from her own strategic inaction) have forced her to make ever more frequent appearances in parliament: to "answer" questions to the house.
But again, she seems to have lately developed an almost masochistic pleasure in this experience: mechanically responding to questions with crazy-making semantic nonsense. Literally hours and hours of parliament's time has been eaten up in this way, as she eats up time by wasting parliamentarians'. It's hard not to get the impression that the more time she spends formulating different ways of saying nothing, she is privately enjoying the practice it allows her to hone her semantic-nonsense-making skills. To borrow the "Maybot" analogy, it's as though each three-hour-long session of speaking to parliament without saying anything allows her semantic-nonsense-making software to be upgraded yet further. Parliament can never win, because her "semantic software" is always one step ahead of them. The fact that such parliamentary sessions thus resemble a form of psychological torture is something that May seems to have little concern about.
This "semantic software" has also been shown off to Brussels, as well, as has been reported, in cabinet itself.

Apart from May's idiosyncratic "speaking skills", there are also more overtly-displayed traits of social dysfunction.
 Her lack of even basic social skills is now well-documented. She famously doesn't "do" small talk. It's as though she simply has no idea what to say to people beyond some basic phrases she may have learned through experience. This indicates a kind of personality that struggles to understand some of the basics of human interaction.
More generally too, this feeds through to her inability to make people feel comfortable in her company; in fact, it appears she has no instinct to want to make people feel comfortable. There are anecdotes of her having meetings with colleagues where almost nothing is said on her part - either in words or in meaning. It is this that also makes spending time with her socially feel like a form of torture. Her stilted mannerisms and frosty demeanor give the impression of someone who simply doesn't like social situations or human interaction at all. This seems more than just "introversion"; it seems like something bordering on pathological. It's as though, at a fundamental level, she doesn't understand people.


Cognitive understanding

When it comes to decision-making and issues of cognition, there are also indications that Theresa May's judgement and sense of perspective is lacking at some critical level.
As said before, there have been plenty of occasions where it appears she has an inability to relate to others; both in terms of social interaction, but also in terms of cognitive understanding. In other words, it's as though she lacks the ability to relate to another's perspective. Either she seems unable to see when others are bored to death by her inability to answer a question, or she can see it but doesn't care. Either one of these would indicate some kind of deeper issue of lacking empathy. More seriously, when real-life situations (such as the Grenfell Tower fire) intrude, her inability to relate to others' feelings has been painfully-clear to see.
One can speculate where this comes from; whether it is just the way she is as a person, or was something that happened as a result of personal experience (and her life has been touched by family tragedy). Regardless, it poses serious questions about how she makes decisions that affect the whole country. And the way she has handled Brexit is a clear example of that: she has been determined to stick to her own interpretation of the vote regardless of what effect it has on others.

Theresa May's (robotic) ability to learn a "brief" as Home Secretary leads on to her bloody-minded obsession with immigration; both in sticking to the target of reducing immigration numbers even after it was clearly impractical, and also in counting international students as "immigrants". Her obsession with immigration demonstrates her blinkered (and neurotic) tendencies, which are a further sign of a perspective on others that appears "anti-social" in its origin. Her inability to see things from another's point of view - a key attribute of empathy - seems missing when it comes to immigration. This is true of her stance on social issues in general, but her rigidity on immigration is the most glaring example.
It is her self-evident obsession with immigration that led to her "red lines" in the Brexit negotiations with the EU. It was "immigration" that led to her interpreting Brexit as the necessity to leave the single market and customs union, which is what led to the infamous "back-stop" (a British idea, it should be remembered). Thus many of the chaotic shenanigans over the British negotiating position have been due to May's own inability to see Brexit as anything other than a vote against immigration.

As has been seen, as reality has shown many of May's political "stratagems" to be ever more absurd, her inability to change political tack and semantic rigidity have made her look like an increasingly-surrealist figure. But on the point of being able to think how others' would see her, she is either cognitively-incapable of this, or absent of any shame.
Either one of these explanations would point to an "anti-social" aspect to her personality. The truth may be a little of both, as we have already seen that she seems to lack empathy; while her apparent shamelessness at simply disseminating, or repeating the same plan as before even after its flaws have been exposed, indicates a bloody-mindedness that is pathological. She will continue with the same approach until it succeeds, regardless of the wider effect.
In this sense, she doesn't care what others think. This attribute was inferred even when she was campaigning for the leadership: that she wasn't interested in (and actually reviled) the superficial "popularity contest" aspect of modern politics. This was demonstrated by her decision to interpret the Brexit result as being an anti-immigration vote, regardless of any wider contributing issues. Her tendency to operate in a "bunker mentality" also supports the view that she would make decisions regardless of outside voices' advice.
While this approach can have its advantages at times, the fact that it is May's "default setting" tells us that she is someone who wants to close-off the outside world, making decisions that affect millions behind closed doors, deep in her "bunker" with a small circle of trusted advisers. This is the mentality of the "anti-social" autocrat; of a ruler safely separated from the ruled.

So Britain has come to be led by someone whose tendencies are anti-social in their nature; who seems to have a problem understanding people, and whose approach to politics seems to lack empathy.

Theresa May's "personality void": her inner psychology and the effect of Brexit

There are two common comments that have been made about Theresa May's personality, by both outside observers and those that have had direct interaction with her: one is her apparent lack of an easily-identifiable personality, and the other is her social awkwardness.

To be fair, there are those - her supporters, for instance - who would dispute these two characterizations, but that's hardly surprising. This simply supports the notion that May is only comfortable around people who she knows like her, or are like her: in other words, when she is in her "comfort zone". To have a fair understanding of someone's personality you need a sense of objectivity to have a have a proper sense of perspective. The vast majority of observations by those outside her loyalist circle have highlighted either one, or both, of the above characteristics.

Dealing with the first of these issues in this article - May's apparent "lack of personality" - is easiest when we look at what we know of her interests and what motivates her.


A personality void

Her motivations seem to stem (unsurprisingly) from how she was brought up. Being raised in the traditional values of "Middle England" of the 1950s as the single child of a vicar (with her mother working as Conservative Party activist), it is not hard to see where she gets her conservative values from. In these highly-specific circumstances of time, place and parentage, it would he hard to be raised in these surroundings and not have conservative values subconsciously instilled in you.
In her interviews, one of the main words May uses to describe her morality is the sense of "service". She has talked in the past of how various people in her family and in past generations have worked in roles that have involved a service element to them, either morally or functionally. In this way, her family background is typical of the ambitions that still embody a traditional English deference to social hierarchy. Due to her family background and history, she has thus been instilled with an innate sense of modesty and self-sacrifice, as well as a sense of duty.

An added element to this which is crucial is how she got involved with the Conservative Party from a young age due to her mother's local connections. This emotional attachment to the party from a young age proves critical to understanding her motivations and well as her interests, because both become fused together in her relationship to the Conservative Party.
Her relationship to the party evolved as she spent time at Oxford University, where she met her husband (again, through their respective connections to the party). Thus it's not hard to an emotional connection to the Conservative Party become even more intertwined from her own mother's initial connections as well as her husband's. In this sense, she might emotionally connect both her parents and her husband with her own ties to the party.
Then, within a few years of her graduating both her parents died in differing circumstances, and by now she worked with the Bank Of England, joining her husband's pursuit in the financial sector. Her steady rise up the Tory ranks followed. Her psychology of "duty" and "service" therefore can be understood in the context of how, after her parents died, the Conservative Party was perhaps the one tangible thing that still kept her emotionally connected to her past. Her motivation was for the service of her party; both as a continuation of the morality of "service" that had been instilled in her from childhood, as well as out of a genuine emotional attachment she may have had for its values. It could be argued then that - in some psychological manner - her interest in the party compensated for the loss of her parents.

In this way, the accusation that Theresa May has no identifiable personality stems from the sense that her devotion to the party is there instead of any identifiable personality. To outsiders, she might seem like a personality void - an empty vessel - because her motivations and interests primarily revolve around her emotional connection to the Conservative Party. This point becomes key to understanding the way she had handled (and politically exploited) Brexit, which we'll look at a little later.

What are her interests, at a personal level? To outside eyes, Theresa May seems insufferably "boring". Her leisure pursuits seem mundane in the extreme: cooking at home and walking in the mountains seem to be the only obvious ones: the kind of things that associated with highly-traditional cultural values. It's hard to think what she and her husband talk about to pass the time, except for issues of politics and values. They appear like a cut-out "Mr and Mrs Middle England"; banal, wholesome, unimaginative and utterly two dimensional. Their personas seem designed to bore you into submission.
It is this lack of depth to both their personalities that feeds the sensation that their personas are masks; psychological "shells" that hide some deeper persona. Can they really, truly be that boring?

From what can be gleaned, the only interest that has been consistent over the years has been Theresa May's consistent interest in the Conservative Party. The "boring" aspect to Theresa May's psychology can be explained by both her stiflingly-orthodox background, and if we see her necessity to emotionally identify with the Conservative Party is because of deeper insecurities.
In this sense, May seems to live and breathe the traditional values of her party; her ideas in that sense may not be seen as her own, but those of her party that she identifies with emotionally for her own reasons. Her party acts as both a kind of emotional "comfort blanket" and as a kind of intellectual "inner voice". Her rhetoric to the party conference is thus her refracting back to the delegates what they want to hear, because what they want to hear is what she wants them to hear, and what she wants to hear herself. Her rhetoric in these "closed spaces" is thus an act of intellectual co-resonance: both her and her party's delegates in a mutual feedback loop. She is to be seen as "one of them" and "they" as part of her.

The understanding that May's core values come from her identification with the Conservative Party is what allowed her to become so popular within the party. Apart from the "Nasty Party" speech early on in her life as a parliamentarian, she has appeared as a living distillation of her party's moral values. The fact that she kept her life private and her thoughts to herself while she was a politician added to an air of mystery, allowing others to distill into her persona the positive attributes that they were looking for in a potential leader.


"The Will Of The People"

Theresa May's evident lack of personality was therefore an advantage when it came to the party leadership election after David Cameron's resignation. Having long instilled a sense that she was, as far as the party members went, "one of them", it was relatively easy to gain the backing of other members of the parliamentary party when the time came.
One of the innate problems of her "personality void" is that she has no natural charisma. Boris Johnson, the other main contender (and favorite) for the leadership, had it in spades; but what he had a surfeit of in charisma he lacked for when it came to willpower and tact. While May lacked charisma, she was able to exude an air of calm competence: she was able to offer the reassuring "comfort blanket" of a Thatcher of the 21st century, seeing in Brexit an act of moral duty to implement the "will of the people". For her, it was not about charisma, but simply one of service to the nation.

In implementing Brexit, Theresa May thus morphed her persona from being simply a servant of her party to being a servant of the country. For a time after her rise to power, her leadership of the country was portrayed as being almost above party politics. Exploiting the personal popularity she had with the electorate (under the same spell her party had been, it seems) her government was now "Theresa May's team". For a time, it didn't matter that she wasn't naturally charismatic or rarely made public appearances; this was excused by the public as she had "more important things to do", and represented a more workmanlike approach to politics that May encouraged. The politics of charisma was over; the politics of duty was back in fashion.
This was how May came to become a kind of Brexit "avatar": in her ideological and moral embrace of the meaning of Brexit, she sought to identify with the motivations and values of those who had supported it. She portrayed her role not really as a "typical" politician, but as someone whose duty was to be the servant of Brexit; through her role as Prime Minister, Brexit's meaning would be done. This explained the seemingly-meaningless semantics of "Brexit means Brexit"; to her, it wasn't meaningless, but perhaps beyond meaning. Brexit's meaning to May was self-evident, and her years of service to the same morality that Brexit represented gave May the self-belief that it gave her some special insight.
While we can only guess at her innermost thinking, it's not hard to imagine that her background made her think she was uniquely-able to meet the challenges of the task, as though Brexit were the task that she had been specially-suited for in life, and that her career had been leading to this moment in time: that a strange kind of fate was at work. At a more human level, even her husband is said to have told her that when it came to the premiership, her years of service to the party demonstrated that she "deserved it". In this sense, her role as leader of Brexit was both an ultimate act of service and the ultimate prize. This contrasting dichotomy of simultaneous great sacrifice with great reward can be seen as a morality whose heart is in the founding ethics of her upbringing.

Prior to the referendum, her support for the EU had been functional if anything; her instincts were in truth as parochial and as culturally-insular as those in Middle England that supported Brexit. Thus, it would have took little effort for her to emotionally identify with the cause, and to want to ensure that she embodied their values. For in reality, Brexit's values were also her own.
The rhetoric she used at the the first party conference as leader demonstrated this, and her determination that Brexit had to be done in a way that was loyal to the vote demonstrated her own psychological desire to continue the same morality that had been with her from a young age: for Theresa May, it wasn't about what she wanted, it was about being loyal to the people; the same morality that is repeated in her loyalty to her party. The referendum could not be ignored; it was her duty to carry out "the will of the people"; she had been chosen as the person with this responsibility; she knew what the people wanted as she was "one of them". These four tenets of belief seem to be the things that are understood like articles of faith by May. Anyone who challenged them would be seen as undermining people's faith in democracy, and by extension, May's own internal belief system. 
That belief system appears to be what is driving her on in the absence of personality.


"I feel sorry for her"

The "personality void" that has been talked about seems to now have been filled by Brexit.

Brexit has become May's raison d'etre. Although when she became leader she talked of her social program, there are few reasons to think that was serious talk; given her record as Home Secretary, more likely this future action was just humanistic "window dressing" to make her seem moderate - part of the "mask" - to hide the empty shell of her persona beneath.
Brexit has consumed May's personality like some kind of esoteric "force of nature". While it acts as a symbolic "talisman" that gives her strange powers of political fortitude and persuasion, its greater chaotic energy is ripping the social fabric of the country apart. Brexit's deeper power is only to corrupt and destroy.

What's more, while Brexit has given Theresa May a kind of political invincibility, it has warped her sense of perspective. Allowing the meaning of Brexit to consume her, all other decisions have to be taken in respect to Brexit. In this way, the government has become the political undead - kept alive by Brexit, but incapable of doing anything else. All the other problems of the country are allowed to deteriorate, leaving the impression of a country slowly falling to pieces, disintegrating socially, as the government is only interested in Brexit.
And even on Brexit itself, because its ultimate meaning is destructive in its nature, it seems to have a strange ability to promote discord among Britain's political masters. As no-one can decide what Brexit means beyond unreal abstractions, the onset of time pushes the country towards the most destructive path of all.
This is the path that could, if continuing discord allows it to happen, ultimately lead to Britain's self-destruction, socially and economically. The horrid irony here is that Theresa May, whose inner psychology is about duty, loyalty and service, will be indirectly responsible for it. It is her personality, and her neurotic loyalty to her party and to Brexit, that is to blame.

Those that see Theresa May on the television have witnessed her physical deterioration over the last two and a half years because of Brexit. It almost seems to sapping the human energy out of her as it yet protects her from her political enemies.

"I feel sorry for her" some have said.
But that sentiment is only a symptom of the wider problem: by choosing to allow the destructive energy of Brexit to guide her, she has abdicated responsibility; she has allowed Brexit to unleash both her inner demons, and the demons that lie within all those seduced by its power.

Brexit: a constitutional crisis, "Civil War" comparisons and Theresa May's narcissism

The purpose of any government and any parliament is to make decisions and implement policy.

It is clear now that Britain's executive and legislative are in a complete constitutional stalemate on Brexit, where the executive cannot agree with the legislature, and the legislature cannot agree with the executive.

The executive - the government - is headed by Theresa May, who has effectively taken unilateral control of all decisions on Brexit since coming to power.
Her party lost full control of parliament  - the legislature - eighteen months ago, but Theresa May seems never to have noticed, with her continuing to act as though having almost unlimited powers. In spite of the self-evident necessity to come to some kind of cross-party agreement when running a minority government, her approach has been divisive and autocratic from the start. She sees things only from the perspective of survival, through exploiting divisions in her enemies combined with the fear of the alternative: the classic approach of an autocrat.

The number of blows and setbacks she has received has become almost difficult to keep up with, but with parliament voting down her agreed deal with the EU by an unprecedented margin - yet her government still staying in power - the sense of constitutional crisis has become irrefutable.

By all historical precedents and conventions, any Prime Minister with a sense of decency and self-awareness would have stood down after such an enormous defeat, made possible only through masses of backbenchers on her own side turning against her. But Theresa May is someone whose character seems as immovable as granite when it comes to facing reality.

It is self-evident that the only way to resolve the impasse between the government and parliament is through a fresh election.
What is so cravenly-hypocritical about May's resistance to new elections now (which she saw as only "heightening divisions") is that only eighteen months ago she called for a new election when she already had a majority. Her justification then was that parliament was somehow "blocking" her government's strategy on Brexit (itself a disingenuous accusation), and that she needed a larger majority to ensure she got legislation through parliament. This was already the strategy of someone who clearly had little real sympathy for democratic principles, and only saw "democracy" as useful when it was useful to her.
Now though, when the chaos is worse than ever because parliament cannot decide and the government cannot pass legislation as a result, May claims that elections only "heighten divisions". So she has gone from wanting elections eighteen months ago because parliament was divided, to now claiming that elections only create divisions. She wanted elections eighteen months ago to make her more powerful; now she wants to prevent them (even though they are self-evidently needed more than ever) in order to cling on to power.
She bears all the hallmarks of a power-obsessed narcissist, who will twist logic into contortions in order to justify her own selfish actions.

May's evident obsession to cling to power appears to stem from a fundamental aspect of her character. She is deeply-traditional by temperament and, as a "dyed in the wool" conservative, sees her position as Prime Minister as one of "duty".
That sense of "duty" she appears to interpret into an almost sacrosanct sense of mission: that she was "chosen" to lead the country through Brexit, and in her role as Prime Minister she is uniquely endowed with the responsibility to decide on the right path of the country.

The problem, when one thinks about this mindset for more than a few seconds, is that same sense of "duty" is what any despot in history also has used to justify their actions.
"Duty" quickly can become corrupted into doing whatever one can to achieve your aims: it might start with dissemination, then using fear, dirty tricks and before long someone can become paranoid and will only listen to advice from those they trust. This is the slippery slope, and Theresa May has shown more than enough evidence of displaying these characteristics.


A "personal rule"?

There is a case to be made that this is the worst constitutional crisis since the Civil War of the mid 17th century.
Charles I got into problems with parliament because he began to act as a despot. At the time, monarchs had a great deal more power to do as they pleased. Charles I, typical of monarchs of the time, saw his right to rule as "God-given". It was his "duty" to rule as much as it was his God-given right, and if parliament were preventing him from doing so, then he saw it as his role to put them right. This was the basic reason for his attempt to arrest troublesome parliamentarians, which quickly escalated into outright war between the two factions.
Charles I was a deeply-proud man, and even after losing the war and under house arrest, he still refused to make serious compromises; instead, he stalled and dragged out time by exploiting the weaknesses and divisions within his opponents, flattering one faction in at attempt to win favour and isolate another, meanwhile blaming his opponents as the ones causing all the problems. While this was going on, he was still trying to organize supporters into a military counter-strike. Eventually, parliament's patience (and their gullibility) was exhausted.

Now that May's deal was voted down in parliament, May has claimed she is ready to listen. Given that this approach would have evidently made more sense after she lost her majority in parliament eighteen months ago, scepticism of her sincerity is not unwarranted.
She had already delayed the vote by a month since December, for the blatantly cynical motive to move the timing closer to the Brexit "cliff" at the end of March, and thus intimidate parliament into backing her deal. Her justifications to parliament before the vote amounted to same thing: intimidation, and threatening that the choice was her deal or the chaos of "no deal".
As parliament didn't buy this line, May's new tactic is for parliament to show the necessity to compromise, but also by highlighting the evident differences between the different factions. In this way, while she claims that her "red lines" (that were the reason for the unacceptable "deal" with the EU in the first place) are inviolate, it is others that must give ground.
She sees her "red lines" as part of her "duty" to implement the "will of the people", conflating what she wants into what she thinks the country wants. In this twisted rationale, if parliament is against her, then it is, by extension, against the people as well.

The cause of this constitutional crisis is clear: Theresa May.

Now that she has technically opened negotiations with parliament, her motives are as transparently-cynical as ever. The negotiations are not there to allow for genuine compromise; only to provide May with the narrative that she "tried" to work with a divided parliament, but because parliament refused her deal and couldn't agree on a compromise, a "no deal" Brexit became inevitable. Her primary aim is that it is not Theresa May who gets blamed for any "no deal" scenario, but someone else. She will happily deflect the blame onto the stubbornness of the opposition in parliament, or even better, the EU. Due to aspects of her personality, she seems to have little genuine ability to compromise, and just stall for as long as necessary, when the blame can be transferred from her to a convenient scapegoat. This is the same tactic used time and again by the autocrat.

We are now in a situation in Britain where the parliament is divided between May's supporters and her opponents, whose own allegiances are hazy and sometimes cross party lines. The parliamentary system is broken, and the country is ran by someone who is only interested in her own survival - for what purpose, it is unclear.

With the military reserves now on stand-by in the result of a "no deal" Brexit, with companies being gagged by Theresa May's government through NDAs, and with the very real threat of shortages and transport chaos, all the signs are that Britain has reached an institutional "tipping point". There seems no way back from the current crisis.

The question is: what on earth comes next?

Narcissism and politics: Theresa May (Part 2)

A few months ago there was a dark rumour in political circles that some figures in the government were secretly orchestrating a "no deal" Brexit that would cause as much chaos as possible; both causing chaos within Britain and also across the EU.

The theory followed a hypothetical series of events where the government (i.e. Theresa May) would cynically lead the EU towards the impression of agreeing to a deal, only to sabotage it at the last minute, leaving the EU with as little time to prepare for the chaos as possible, and leaving Britain dependent on American logistical support until the period of "no deal" chaos passed. Such a scenario would turn Britain into a de facto American "client state" where what remained of government infrastructure and assets would be sold off in a "fire-sale", with the British economy as a kind of Libertarian dystopia. This would also leave the EU in a state of economic turmoil as an added "bonus".

The scenario that Britain currently finds itself in is due to the actions of its Prime Minister, Theresa May. Thanks to her actions:

• The British government spent nearly two years negotiating with itself - due to May's own perpetual stalling tactics. The government's position to start serious negotiations with the EU was then only agreed after Mrs May forced her own position on to her government (i.e."Chequers").
• Due to her "red lines", this position was then rejected by the EU. This resulted in May unilaterally deciding on her government's new position without consulting her own government or parliament. The consequent "deal" she unilaterally agreed with the EU was thus a result of May's "red lines", which forced the EU to demand terms that May must surely have known the British parliament would find unacceptable. 
• When May tried to convince parliament to ratify her "deal", she dealt with them in the same way as her own government: to cajole and disseminate to make them accept the unacceptable, or face "no deal". When it was clear that parliament would not agree to the deal, her tactic was to delay the vote to the last possible moment - and subvert democracy in the most cynical way - or allow the country to descend into chaos (see hypothetical scenario above).

Put in this light, May's actions resemble those of an unashamed autocrat working to blatantly undermine the democratic system. She has little moral regard for the idea of the democratic process, and ultimately sees herself as the sole arbiter of the land. 

Worse than that, she seems to have lost any rational sense of perspective, seeming not to care about the political damage she is doing to her party, her government and parliament, and seems to care little about the wider damage she is doing to the economy and to people's lives in general.

How to lose friends and alienate people

This author has written before about Theresa May's personality, and how there seems to something "off" about her behaviour and her judgement. All the evidence points to her being someone who seems to want to go out of her way to annoy friends and enemies alike, inadvertently or otherwise. 

This singular ability to alienate herself from those she engages with is truly exceptional in the annals of political leadership; even Nixon had better judgement and charisma. It seems the only ones she can retain the loyalty of are those that have entirely self-serving and amoral ambitions, or are too cowardly to want to give up their own ministerial status. The combined result of this is governmental positions that are filled by incompetents; the natural consequence of being ruled by a narcissist is some kind amoral personality cult where rationalism and intelligence are the main enemy.

In pursuing her "deal" outside of democratic consent or transparency, she has alienated both wings of her party against her by her own terrible judgement, as well as losing what little respect the grassroots of the party had left for her. As she never wanted to engage with the opposition, she lost any chance of gaining their support long ago, and has managed to also lose the confidence of the DUP, so she now is ruling a government with no functional majority, even on paper. 

And now that she no longer has the backing of parliament, she seeks "rule by extortion" instead: threatening the chaos of "no deal" if it doesn't support her deal - a deal that is only so awful to contemplate because May's stubbornness made it so.  

The events of the last few weeks have shown that Theresa May is someone who cannot be reasoned with. She does not listen, is incapable of admitting she is wrong, and cannot be trusted.

Her stubbornness is now legendary, but then this is compounded by the fact that even when she has changed her mind on something (such as calling for an early election), she makes it even worse by refusing to admit the obvious. Such "crazy-making" behaviour is an indication of pathological narcissism.

One of the other indicators of narcissism is a lack of "emotional intelligence": the ability to see things from another's point of view, and use human empathy and persuasion to explain your point of view.
It is clear that Theresa May lacks "emotional intelligence" in spades: she seems incapable of understanding how her government's policies might harm other people's lives, from her stance on EU migration to the "hostile environment" and the government's pursuit of austerity and welfare reform. Instead, she only focuses on the job she has tasked herself with doing, with no real regard to the effects of its wider, human impact. The countless stories of lives destroyed by her government's policies seem to have no effect on her. This is evident in her obsession with reducing migration, which she pursues relentlessly long after her colleagues have given up on it as a fool's errand. To have such a blinkered perspective is a sign a dysfunctional personality.

Then there is other evidence such as how she reacts spontaneously in the face of a human crisis (e.g. the Grenfell fire), where she demonstrated a chronic inability to do what any normal person would do (which Jeremy Corbyn then demonstrated) - to emotionally engage with the victims.
Equally, this lack of emotional intelligence is evident from the many anecdotes of those who have had to endure conversations with her. European politicians have been invited to a meeting with her, only to discover she had nothing to say; likewise, the many stories of her frosty (or sphinx-like) demeanor in meetings with her colleagues make the phrase "Ice Queen" that has been thrown around to describe her seem apt. And let's not forget her famous "death stare".

It is a common perception that politicians are wont to lie and disseminate rather than admit an uncomfortable truth, but May manages to do this is in such a cringe-worthy and blatantly dishonest way (e.g. demonstrated by facial contortions), that you wonder why she bothers. Politicians are wont to avoid answering uncomfortable questions, but May manages to do this in such a cringe-worthy and leaden way that it makes conversation with her almost physically-painful to endure.


A reign of fear

The natural result of this lack of "emotional intelligence" is that when narcissists are in a position of power, what they fall back on to maintain their hold is fear: fear of the alternative or fear of the unknown. In this manner, the atmosphere of rule under the narcissist is akin to a "reign of terror".
This was evident when Downing Street was ruled under the guidance of Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill.
Since the 2017 election, May has fell back on her other advisors and her her whips to hold the party together. "Fear" was used by May herself to justify calling the snap election; in that case it was "fear of Jeremy Corbyn" that was the main threat she used. It worked (just about), but the result was a ruling government that was held together not by shared respect for Theresa May but by fear she stoked of the alternative: a reign of fear created by May herself.

It is this "reign of fear" that then allows May to dictate and control events beyond any measure of accountability, as we have seen with her dictatorial management of Brexit.

The Gothic mood music and almost ghoulish quality to aspects of her character make it feel as if hers is a government of the undead. Ever since the election of eighteen months ago, her "zombie government" has been losing ministers at a rate of attrition unprecedented in British political history. As government presides over a state of institutional stasis, the country is slowly falling apart, society slowly disintegrating thanks to her government's amoral social policies, and the economy outside of London is barely functional.
It is a government that literally has no purpose but power for the sake of power, with Theresa showing every sign of narcissistic delusion about the necessity of her own position. As far as she is concerned, she seems to feel it is her moral obligation to rule. 

Theresa May's personality - and the innate strain of narcissism that seems to run through it - is the primary cause of the chaos that Britain faces. Two and half years ago, the future of Britain after the referendum was unclear; but it was not certain that it would be chaotic. It is only Theresa May's dysfunctional personality that has made it so.  

It is hard to imagine how the Brexit process, after the referendum, could have been handled any worse. 

May's most recent actions in delaying parliament's vote on her "deal" as long as possible only serve to extend the wider chaos in the country even further to the brink, as the value of the economy collapses further, businesses are unable to plan, and people are left in a state of paralyzing trauma. It is as though Theresa May has declared a kind of psychological warfare on her own population, regardless of her actual intentions. 

Seen in this objective light, Theresa May's behaviour can be seen as nothing more than selfish and self-defeating: the actions of an irrational narcissist. 

Theresa May, Salzburg and the "Brexit speech": a psychological portrait of narcissism

It has been a year since Theresa May's Florence Speech, where she set out what aims the British government had. A year on from that, almost to the day, we had the events of the informal EU heads' meeting in Salzburg.

Looking back over the events of the year that has transpired since May's Florence speech, we see a pattern of behaviour from Theresa May in her treatment of the negotiations with the EU. The "vision" that her Florence speech set out was never one that the EU could or would ever accept; it would break their own rules, for a start.
However, in the desire for the negotiations to move forward from "Phase 1", last December the EU agreed to a compromise - a "fudge" - on the intractable issue of Northern Ireland, where the UK agreed to a "backstop" if the UK failed to provide a solution to the problem of the NI border. Negotiations moved forward on the clear understanding that the UK would provide a solution to the EU in due course. However, the compromise was quickly backtracked on by the UK, who claimed a different "interpretation" to the wording of what was agreed with the EU. Meanwhile, the UK government have pushed back the submission of a "solution" to the NI border at every opportunity. Like an errant student, May has wangled extension after extension on the submission deadline of their homework to teacher. At some point, the teacher's patience is bound to snap.


Ending the indulgence

After nine months of this charade, it is not unreasonable for the EU to have felt duped. After doing what they could to move things forward for the benefit of Theresa May last December, they found out later on they had been "played". May's tactics seen in this way appear as those someone taking advantage of the others' charity, eking out negotiations with the EU by playing on their fears of May being replaced by a hardliner if they didn't compromise. On top of that, the British government's other strategy of getting the EU "on side" was to have their ministers going around the various EU capitals in a ham-fisted "divide and rule" approach that ignored the EU's hierarchy and institutions. Both these approaches seem to have convinced the EU that their indulgence of May's behaviour has only worked out against them, making May more brazen in her approach rather than more compromising. More on that in a moment.

May's "Chequers" plan was meant to have been a method of resolving the outstanding issues, including Northern Ireland, and also of providing the grounding for a future relationship. But given that the plan was only really there to hold together the opposing sides of her party, the EU's opinion seems to have been only an afterthought. Almost as soon as the plan's contents were public in July, the EU explained how they were impractical and broke the rules of the single market, as was obvious to anyone who understood how the EU functioned as an institution. The EU reiterated the possible alternatives; options that the EU had explained to the British government from the start of the negotiations.
So May went into the Salzburg meeting, with the EU having already rejected key aspects of the plan, as well as even a large part of her own party. When she talked to the other EU heads on Wednesday, the EU leaders were then stunned by the tone of her "pitch" to them: that her Chequers deal was the only one she could offer, she couldn't change it, and that the onus was on the EU to compromise. It was May's stubborn refusal to budge that had provoked the strong words from Donald Tusk and others on Thursday, and which led to May's bizarre and tetchy press conference that afternoon.

As the expectation was that some kind of "bridging" compromise was bound to be reached at Salzburg (i.e. one that could see a basis for further discussions in October), what had made the actual conclusion so abrupt had been May's inability to be flexible. One wonders if her personality is the culprit, as it has been for most of her failings as a national leader. As she appears to have a personality indicative of some pathological form of narcissism, this might explain how she could have arrived at the Salzburg meeting with such a delusional view of how events would transpire. While this can only be conjecture, circumstantial evidence of how she runs her government within a "bunker" of sycophantic advisors suggests that May doesn't know what the EU is really thinking because no-one around her is inclined to tell her. In this way, her brittle ego only listens to people she trusts, and those she trusts can only maintain that trust by telling her things that don't contradict her own world-view.
 Bringing in a comparable (and relevant) example from reality television, is "Amy's Baking Company". This is a company that featured on Gordon Ramsay's well-known programme, ran by a woman (the eponymous Amy) who is literally incapable of handling criticism.

Ramsay is incapable of getting even basic points across to Amy, who is defended from the rest of the world by her "enabling" husband. Any criticism is seen as an "attack". As a result, Ramsay decides he's wasting his time trying to change someone who cannot change.
Tusk and the other EU leaders seem to have reacted to May's stance on Wednesday in a similar way: for them, May's inability to compromise at this late stage seems to have been the last straw.

With May's position being so tenuous after the Chequers plan bombed with her own party, it's also possible that May felt she needed to talk "tough" at Salzburg in order to shore up her position for the party conference. But if that was true, then this was also the fault of her poor strategic thinking; something that is another of her unfortunate traits. Talking tough to the EU would make it all the harder to climb down in her party's eyes in time for a compromise in October. If she had compromised as the EU was expecting her to do, the party conference would have been tempestuous at best, putting at jeopardy the compromises needed for any positive outcome in October. She would have needed to tell the party a few unpleasant home truths at conference about what was realistic to achieve; but again, May is not temperamentally the type to make waves, and her stubborn streak also extends to her political durability.
When she returned to the UK, she then made an impromptu speech.


In the mouth of madness

After May's plan was rejected by the EU, the manner of that rejection (and Tusk's "instagram") seems to have affected May quite profoundly. Her surprise at the EU's inability to compromise seemed genuine, and thus the rejection of her plan she took as a personal affront. She had been publicly shamed, as far as she was concerned.
But with the way she approached the Salzburg meeting, she seems to have taken the attitude of the ever-indulged narcissist: as the EU had always compromised over her wishes, why wouldn't they do so again? Couldn't the EU see that Chequers wasn't already a "compromise" as far as May was concerned? Therefore, it was the EU's "turn" to do the same. This seems to have been her take on the situation, going to Salzburg.
But again, it seems clear that May simply doesn't "get it": there are some things the EU cannot compromise on, such as breaching their own rules. This had been clear from the very start. But May, like the typical narcissist, just doesn't listen. She only listens to people that confirm her own bias.

The rationale for the impromptu speech on Friday afternoon may well have been aimed at securing her position with her party, but the tone of the speech seems to have been driven by narcissistic rage. She singles out Donald Tusk for criticism, and uses untruth and psychological projection to accuse the EU of being disrespectful; quite a bold accusation, considering how much the British government had taking the EU for fools for the last nine months, as mentioned earlier. Making liberal use of her infamous "death stare", it is a speech that is designed for domestic audiences; but to the objective observer, it looks like the speech of someone on the verge of losing all self-control (and self-respect). She then reiterates her inability to compromise, demanding like she did in Salzburg that the EU must shift their position, or there would be no deal.

The effect of the speech on the talks, given what she said, is to increase the likelihood of "no deal" even higher. With now less than a month before the last real meeting, and with the party conference likely to be belligerent towards any kind of compromise with the EU, May's behaviour has brought the talks effectively to an end.
An inability to listen, an inability to change, and May's fragile ego seem to have brought Britain into the mouth of the abyss.

The psychology of Conservatism and Nationalism: a "controlled environment", or is it just Narcissism?

Broadly-speaking, nationalism could be said to act as a psychological "comfort blanket". There is a lot to be said for the argument that people who are ideologically-conservative also desire a "controlled environment"; in other words, they require the psychological security of an environment where they feel "safe", where things are familiar, and where things don't change. This last point is the entire nature of Conservatism as an ideology.
The psychology of narcissism is inherently tied to this. The concept of a "controlled environment" is something that can be found in narcissists, who seek to have the last say in how people behave who they interact with, and require an environment where things stay exactly as they are, in a state of controlled inertia.
In the same way that the concept of change scares a conservative, "change" terrifies a narcissist. Both react to "change" as a threat, as it challenges the carefully-constructed environment that they have created for themselves. The carefully-constructed environment both narcissists and conservatives have created stems from insecurity.

The family member or partner of a narcissist, if they allow the narcissist to have their own way (as it is the easiest way to avoid conflict), will find decisions made for them by the narcissist, their possessions are no longer their own, and the company they choose no longer a matter of their free-will. The narcissist is a "control freak" at heart, because of their innate insecurity. That insecurity inhabits itself through the establishment of a "controlled environment" at home, and an irrational (and unethical) desire to impose their will on to others in the world in general; the world must be moulded to suit the narcissist's desires, rather than the narcissist adapt to reality.
This can also be exhibited as an intense and pathological inability to change their views (i.e. stubbornness), even if that causes them (and others) far more problems than it would if they had changed their mind in the first place. This is more accurately a kind of neurosis - mental incapacity - where things must be done as the narcissist decided, as to admit that they were wrong would create a crisis of confidence in their own fragile sense of self-esteem. In Britain, Theresa May seems to be a good real-world example of a personality that is so neurotic (and innately narcissistic) in her inability to change, she would rather the country go to ruin than bring herself to admit her judgement was wrong.
Again, this stems from insecurity, as it is psychologically difficult for the narcissist to change their perspective on the world; they see it as easier to get the world to change for them. The narcissists' sense of self-esteem is so fragile that anything that threatens to change their own carefully-constructed and cast-iron perception of the world must be either disregarded or disparaged.
And when that "carefully-constructed perception" is destroyed, the reaction from the narcissist is the same as a child's tantrum: anger, fury, vindictiveness and spite at the source of their "pain". At their worst, the narcissist reacts to their world-view being shown as an illusory fantasy as the highest form of betrayal, lashing out at even those that care for them if they are unable to "get even" with the ultimate source of the "problem". Someone must pay for the narcissist's emotional suffering, even if it redirected at the innocent, or even those that they claim to care about the most. The narcissist's rage can be something fearsome to behold.

The behaviour above that describes the narcissist also applies to the ideological nationalist, and to conservative thinking on general. At its most toxic level, this can manifest itself as far-right extremism, such as seen in the alt-right or Islamic fundamentalism. This is the psychology of the "loser" who wants to get revenge on society. In the male-dominated world of the far-right, it is about the creation of a society where men are superior to women, culture is homogeneous, and unorthodox thinking is suppressed and persecuted; the logical conclusion of a narcissist's "controlled environment", writ large. This is the narcissists' "power fantasy".
 The psychology of Hitler is the most extreme manifestation of this type of "malignant narcissism" embodied in one person, as his "nationalism" was a psychological projection of his childhood insecurities, creating Nazi Germany as the manifestation of his disturbed ego. In a different manner, J Edgar Hoover is another example of someone with his own insecurities (also seen in his widely-reported dysfunctional personal life) who led the FBI as his own personal "controlled environment" through the tenures of eight presidents, from Coolidge to Nixon. In this manner, he ruled the USA as a "power behind the throne" for decades, using his position to indulge his own prejudices on the nation, with the power to potentially decide the fate of millions at his whim. In the end it was Nixon, another personality with a mass of insecurities, that oversaw Hoover's slide into irrelevance.

Going into the psychology of nationalism (and Conservatism in general), the core tenet is about people wanting to preserve things they way they were when they were a child. At the most extreme embodiment, Hitler seemed to have his own fantastical version of Germany in his head: psychologists have talked of him having a "God Complex" coming from his mother, who  died when he was an adolescent. In this sense, his idolization of Germany before the First World War (and his desire to unite all German-speaking peoples) may have come from the insecurity felt by the loss of his beloved mother; to equate pre-war Germany with the time his mother was still alive, which then morphed into thinking that creating a greater Germany would somehow assuage his feelings of loss for his mother. With other accumulated insecurities piled on top of this, such as his acquired hatred of the Jews, we see the blinkered, twisted vision of a man who seeks to create the ultimate "controlled environment".
Hitler is the extreme embodiment of this; at a more prosaic level, conservatives in general seem to psychologically hark back to a time when things were more "familiar", when the world seemed like a simpler, less unpredictable, place. This inevitably goes back to the time of their childhood. But the desire to "turn back the clock" can itself only come from the desire to change reality as it exists now; an irrational (and even unethical) desire to impose their will on the rest of society. This is the core psychology of the narcissist.

While this desire for "turning back the clock" can in some ways be just harmless fantasizing ("stop the world, I want to get off!"), there are plenty of examples of where this has led to a surge of narcissistic rage when this fantasy is resisted by others. The violence of the alt-right in the USA, and now the surge of far-right violence in Britain and Europe, are all signs of narcissistic rage. Unwilling to accept that diversity of opinion and culture is a normal part of life in the developed world, the far-right seek to express their frustration that they cannot "turn back the clock"; thus they seek to impose their version of a "controlled environment" by use of violence and intimidation.
At a different level, the same can be seen in Britain with the rhetoric of "Brexiteers", who talk of saboteurs, appeasement and betrayal. This is the same language that a narcissist would use when confronted with people who refuse to follow their commands. When this is writ large in supportive elements of the media, this harsh rhetoric only encourages others to carry out violence in their name.

The psychology of Populism and Donald Trump is the psychology of narcissism, in the same way that "Brexit" is the irrational psychology of narcissism. But the world cannot be tamed to follow his vision as the narcissist would like to think it is. The politics of "Brexit" and Donald Trump are about "nativism", and wanting to make society more homogeneous and more predictable, as it was when its supporters were growing up. If the world cannot be made to do as the narcissist pleases, then they will construct their own "controlled environment" at home where they can feel safe. This is the psychological root of American isolationism; and it is the logical conclusion that "Brexit" will take, once its architects see that the world does not care what they think, and cannot be cajoled into doing what they want.
The stereotypical old-aged conservative is the man (or woman) who is sat at home, alone and friendless, complaining to anyone who will listen about how the world has changed beyond recognition, how nothing is as good as it used to be, and how he no longer feels like he belongs in the world.
It is a sad existence, and one that is entirely self-inflicted.