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.
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