Goodbye, Theresa May

The former prime minister is leaving the House of Commons after 27 years: she leaves with dignity but a chequered legacy

Theresa May has announced that she will not contest her Maidenhead constituency at the forthcoming general election. She will have spent 27 years in the House of Commons, a commendable stint; her predecessor David Cameron only just topped 15 years as MP for Witney, though the Conservative leader before him, Michael Howard, also served 27 years as a Member of Parliament.

May did something important when she resigned as prime minister in 2019, however. Unlike Cameron and Sir Tony Blair, she remained in the House of Commons. More than that, she remained active, unlike Gordon Brown and Sir John Major, who both served a parliament after their Downing Street years but were not much seen on the green benches. Before them, Margaret Thatcher left at the first seemly opportunity, the general election 18 months after her defenestration, though she hardly faded into the background, to Major’s chagrin. How his blood must have run cold when she told party workers shortly after she ceased to be prime minister, “I shan’t be pulling the levers, but I shall be a very good backseat driver”. Much would hinge on the definition of “good”.

Assuming Labour wins the election, we will have an extraordinary eight former prime ministers in circulation. Only two—Truss and Sunak—will be in the Commons, though may do not expect the current premier to stay long if he is indeed ousted from Downing Street, while David Cameron, alone of them, has taken a seat in the House of Lords. He did so in order to return to front-line politics as foreign secretary in November 2023, and I applauded him for that: it seemed absurd that an intelligent, vigorous and experienced politician should be cast adrift in his late 50s. You can dislike the man and/or his policies, and disapprove (or not) of his tenure so far at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, but it is hard to argue that either party currently has star quality to spare. I wrote an article for The Hill at the time in which I pointed out that “former prime ministers have a residual stardust that other politicians find hypnotic”, and that five former prime ministers in the 20th century had served under their successors in some capacity, usually as foreign secretary.

Fundamentally, Cameron is good with people. He has an easy patrician charm and self-assurance, which impressed former President Obama and intermittently won over former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Essentially he is a grown-up in the room, and — this is often underestimated — is exceptionally able; he was highly regarded by his tutors at Oxford and his premiership indicated imagination and an ability to think counterintuitively. As a face-to-face practitioner of foreign policy and diplomacy, he promises a great deal.

It is still far too early to tell what effect Cameron has had on British foreign policy, but I doubt it will be judged wholly malign.

I would imagine Theresa May will take the peerage that will inevitably be offered. She has no ideological objections to the House of Lords, as far as I am aware, and nominated 43 people for peerages during her time in office (though by comparison with other prime ministers that was extremely abstemious). If she can live with the strictures of the House of Lords register of interests, which probably deterred at least Major and Blair, she will fit into ermine well, and there have certainly been less deserving candidates for the upper house.

Here is not the place to dwell at length on her legacy. Her premiership was pretty dismal, dominated by wrangling over Brexit, to which she had no great ideological commitment, having campaigned to Remain though without florid or zealous enthusiasm. She was brought down, as much as anything else, by a simply inability to manage a near-unmanageable parliamentary party. This was ironic, as her long tenure as home secretary (2010-16) had given her an unearned reputation as a safe pair of hands. When the BBC screened Laura Kuenssberg’s documentary State of Chaos, about the Brexit saga and its aftermath, I was harsh in my judgement of May’s premiership. She played a bad hand with “an astonishing lack of skill”, was “disastrously inconsistent” and was “the wrong person to lead” in whose hands “almost every decision was wrong”. I stand by all of that.

On a personal level, May attracted and has continued to attract considerable sympathy and even admiration for her pose of nobility against adversity. After her announcement today that she was standing down, Iain Dale said that “her sense of duty shone like a light”, Jon Sopel remarked that “she put Britain’s economic interests before the slash and burn wishes of her party’s zealots”, Michel Barnier added that “her tenacity and courage are to be admired” and Julia Hartley-Brewer derscribed her as a “formidable politician (who never played the woman card) and a good person”. and Even Ian Dunt, hardly a fan, admitted that “she had the humility to stay in the Commons after being PM”. Up to a point, Lord Copper. No-one forced the ambitious May to seek the premiership for which she was brutally unequipped. But that is for another time.

I wrote in October 2022 that there was no settled role in public life for former prime ministers. Notwithstanding Boris Johnson’s fantasies, or those projected on to him by his wild-eyed devotees, prime ministers do not get a second chance at the top job. Harold Wilson was the last premier to serve two non-consecutive terms (1964-70, 1974-76), and his second stint in Downing Street was unhappy, the political and economic circumstances grim, his energy levels diminished. He had, though it was little remarked upon at the time, almost died in the summer of 1973 when he was left clinging on to the side of a motorboat on the Isles of Scilly. Although he celebrated only his 58th birthday shortly into his second premiership, he had, to use Jacinda Ardern’s phrase, very little left in the tank, admitting to one adviser, “I have been around this racetrack so often that I cannot generate any more enthusiasm for jumping any more hurdles”. Perhaps his memory and powers of concentration, which had been formidable, were already stuttering, and it has certainly been suggested that he was suffering from the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease when he resigned in 1976.

I will freely admit that May has a powerful sense of public duty. There is a secret truth that we like not to acknowledge which is that most politicians, in fact, do have a strong urge to serve, though inevitably this is inextricably intertwined with a powerful ego which convinces them that their service is unusually, almost uniquely, valuable. Since leaving office in the summer of 2019, and being re-elected to the House of Commons that December, she has been an active backbencher: although she has only submitted five written questions, she has spoken in the chamber 235 times and taken part in 585 divisions (about 60 per cent if one excludes the Committee of the whole House stage of bills). By contrast, Gordon Brown spoke just 16 times in his last Parliament (2010-15), while John Major, after acting as leader of the opposition in May and June 1997, only spoke 23 times in the 1997-2001 Parliament before stepping down.

She has neither remained scrupulously neutral and uncontroversial nor indulged in an orgy of recriminations. In July 2021, she defied the Conservative whip for the first time in her career to vote against the government’s reduction of the international aid budget, speaking powerfully but soberly. When the report of Cabinet Office official Sue Gray into “Partygate” was released in January 2022, May did not hold back from criticising her successor, Boris Johnson.

What the Gray report does show is that No. 10 Downing Street was not observing the regulations they had imposed on members of the public, so either my right hon. Friend had not read the rules, or did not understand what they meant—and others around him—or they did not think the rules applied to No. 10. Which was it?

It was the more stinging for her habitual sombre and clinical delivery.

The longest post-premiership Commons career in modern times goes, of course, to Sir Edward Heath, who left Downing Street in March 1974 and remained an MP until 2001. He never reconciled himself to his removal as leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, never really accepted the leadership of Margaret Thatcher and was always happy, insofar as one could ever detect happiness in Heath, to be critical of her; not for nothing was the 25-year stint known as “the incredible sulk”. For his last two parliaments (1992-97, 1997-2001), he was father of the House of Commons, the longest continuously serving Member of Parliament, and by virtue of that role presided over the elections as speaker of Betty Boothroyd and Michael Martin. The process played to his weighty but curmudgeonly persona.

Almost as long a period after Downing Street was spent in the Commons by David Lloyd George. The “Welsh Wizard” was ousted by his Conservative colleagues in the wartime coalition in October 1922 but he was MP for the Carnarvon Boroughs until February 1945, when he was created an earl; like Heath, he became father of the House, but for longer, holding the distinction between 1929 and 1945. But Lloyd George’s post-premiership career was very different, in many ways singular. He was leader of the Liberal Party from 1926 to 1931, having led the breakaway National Liberal Party in 1922-23 before reconciling with H.H. Asquith and the mainstream party.

In his own mind, he never really left the front rank of politics. In the 1924 Parliament, he led the third party (albeit there were a scant 40 Liberal MPs and a Conservative government with a crushing majority of 209, a record for a single party). When the National Government was formed in August 1931, he might have expected to be offered a position, as former prime minister Stanley Baldwin, Lloyd George’s deputy Sir Herbert Samuel and Sir John Simon of the breakaway Liberal National Party were all included, but he was recovering from prostate surgery. He remained a political force and a considerable orator, and in 1935 he submitted a memorandum-cum-manifesto to the cabinet entitled Organizing Prosperity: A Scheme of National Reconstruction. This was dubbed “Lloyd George’s New Deal”, an acknowledgement of President Franklin Roosevelt’s economic programme, and from April to June 1935 a cabinet sub-committee met 10 times to scrutinise it. But his reputation was his downfall. Two-thirds of the 470 Conservative MPs would not countenance his return to government. Even in 1940, aged 77, he retained hopes of a revival. He was offered th post of minister of agriculture in Churchill’s coalition, but Lloyd George refused to serve alongside Neville Chamberlain. In any event, he told his secretary later that year he was playing a longer game: “I shall wait until Winston is bust”.

Theresa May has been lucky and unlucky. Liz Truss’s calamitous 49-day premiership saves her from serious consideration as the worst prime minister of modern times, and Boris Johnson’s brass-necked and mendacious adventurism has lent her character a certain charm and honesty. But her premiership reminds me a little of the old-fashioned historiography of Mary Tudor: A.F. Pollard dismissively said in his History of England (1913) that “sterility was the conclusive note” and Sir Geoffrey Elton toed the line in 1955’s England Under The Tudors by saying “positive achievements there were none”. It may be there is a revival of interest in May and a recalibration of negative judgements, but I am not so sure.

In the desperate days of July 2022, as Johnson’s government teetered on the edge of collapse, it was mooted that May might be drafted in as a caretaker prime minister, but even this was only as a temporary measure. The theory went that Johnson might simply walk away rather than staying in post while a successor was chosen by the Conservative Party, and May was suggested as a place-holder. But it is significant that, throughout the agonies of the current administration, as Johnson slowly sank, Truss blazed then fizzled and Sunak has flailed, there has never been a serious move to draft May back to office. Her name was mentioned in the summer of 2021 as a potential secretary general of NATO—but then, whose was not?—but Downing Street’s door has remained closed.

This is not the end of Theresa May’s public existence, unless she wishes it to be. She will only be 68 this autumn, and will be invited to state events with her phalanx of fellow ex-premiers. Assuming she accepts a peerage, she will have a platform in the House of Lords for as long as she wants it (or until it is reformed, though I doubt that is an immediate prospect) and her voice will always be readily heard because, whatever else, she ascended the political tree and was the Queen’s first minister for three years. She earns a substantial amount of money making speeches around the world—Tortoise reported that she had made £2.5 million between 2019 and the end of 2022 and she earned another £500,000 or so last year—and “British prime minister” still (just) retains scarcity value.

It is tempting to hang Tacitus’s famous judgement of the Emperor Galba around Theresa May’s neck: Maior privato visus dum privatus fuit, et omnium consensu capax imperii nisi imperasset (“He seemed too great to be a citizen so long as he was a citizen and all would have agreed that he was worthy to the imperial office, if he had never held it”). She was a surprise choice for home secretary when the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition was formed in 2010, Chris Grayling having held the portfolio in opposition while May was shadow work and pensions secretary. But Grayling, accident-prone and tin-eared, had endured a shocking election campaign, and David Cameron wanted the Department for Work and Pensions for the former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith, who had spent more than five years working on ways to address poverty with the Centre for Social Justice, which he had founded. So it was Theresa May’s moment.

Being appointed to, and holding on to, one of the great offices of state put her inevitably into consideration, at least in theory, for the premiership. When it fell vacant unexpectedly in 2016, after Cameron lost the Brexit referendum, she emerged unchallenged to take the top job. She was not the best candidate for the premiership but she was the person to whom fewest objected, or objected least vehemently. And now, as emerges from the finale of Pagliacci, La commedia è finita. Perhaps there has been a lesson in it—but in politics, there often is not.