Getting things right with the benefit of
hindsight is easy enough; getting them right in advance is a lot harder. But Theresa May’s premiership was doomed to end
in tears from the point at which she picked up a red pen and started drawing impossible
and contradictory red lines. From the
outset, the approach she deployed was hopelessly inappropriate for the task in
hand, but even as she departs, I don’t think she understands where she went
wrong. Everything is the fault of
someone else.
One phenomenon which I’ve observed over
many years, both in politics and in the world of work, is the inability of some
people – Theresa May being a classic example, but far from the only one – to distinguish
between the roles of leader, manager and boss.
The result of such an inability is that such people see ‘leadership’ as
a role to which they are appointed or elected rather than a series of
attributes and approaches, and once in the role behave as though their job is
to give instructions – ‘boss mode’. If a
boss is what is required, it can work; but in the field of politics in
particular, expecting others to do as you say ‘because I’m the boss’ is rarely
an effective strategy.
Yet that is the strategy which we have seen
time and again. We saw it in the way in
which she attempted to bounce the DUP into agreeing her original agreement with
the EU27 in December 2017. She hadn’t
thought it necessary to consult or even discuss what she had agreed with the
DUP, assuming instead that they would simply fall into line. We’ve seen it several times in Cabinet
meetings, where members come out not knowing what has been agreed and end up
being surprised at what got presented as the ‘agreed’ outcome. It was precisely that approach which caused
the ultimate meltdown this week – Cabinet members appear not to have understood
that she was assuming they were agreeing to her latest plan.
Some are expressing sympathy for her now
that she’s been so unceremoniously forced out – I’m afraid that I have
none. She was the wrong person for the
job from the outset, elected accidentally after her internal opponents’
campaigns went into meltdown, and appears still not to understand why. Her repeated failure to understand that
applying a winner-takes-all majoritarian approach was never going to heal divisions
or reunite people has only made things worse.
Looking at the likely successors fills me with trepidation, and the
Brexit clock is still ticking. Her
biggest – perhaps only – achievement has been to steal the title of worst PM
from her predecessor. Sympathy and false
praise from those whose futures she has tried so hard to trash are wholly inappropriate responses.
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1 comment:
Spirit of BME said (on a different post, but I think he probably intended it to be here....)
A good post.
I think that the red lines she made were lost by the time the ink was dry, as she forgot the basic rule of any negotiation – Control the timing and the agenda.
On your observation on Leader. Manager and Boss, totally agree – been there done that.
She was a classic boss who got people to do things for her by fear and intimidation, which indicates most times I have observed this, as a deep lack of confidence in themselves, hence the reputation she cultivated of “being a bloody difficult woman to deal with”. She had another problem that she was not a “lucky manager” in that she failed to spot, recruit good people around her, as we saw in the 2016 election.
Finally, my valet reports that below stairs in the servant’s hall, she is attracting the “poor mare” sympathy vote, but above stairs I am of the same mind as yourself, she stood for the job and was found out.
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