Nothing has changed, again. Refresh, renew? No chance, not with the top posts unaltered, not with her economic and Brexit direction ploughing full steam ahead. The rigidly immobile British prime minister can make no significant change, only propped up in post by the precarious balance within her warring party. Even when she tries to move a minister, Jeremy Hunt just says no. Who’s in charge here? Not her.
This empty soft-shoe shuffle where one “who?” replaces another “who?” captures everything about British Prime Minister Theresa May’s state of stasis. She is stable for now, until the crunch comes in the autumn, when cake-and-eat-it delusions die. When Brexit is finally defined it can never satisfy the Gove-Redwood-Johnson-Rees-Mogg faction without the Hammond-Rudd-Grieve-Soubry-Clarke rebels resisting anything that wrecks the future. The Northern Ireland border runs right through it — the emblematic line that cannot be fudged.
So there she stands, stable but weak. Nothing illustrates her stuckness more than this feeble reshuffle of a few unknowns. She had hoped that Boris Johnson would grow up and into his job, but he remains Donald Trump-like, as embarrassingly unsuited as ever.
His blunder endangering the imprisoned Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe should have had him fired instantly. His recitation in a Buddhist temple of Rudyard Kipling’s poem Mandalay, including the lines, ‘... and the temple bells they say/ Come you back you British soldier...’ had to be stopped by the British ambassador: was Johnson ignorant or deliberately provocative about Britain’s suppression of Myanmar’s resistance to colonial rule? But whatever he does, she can’t sack him.
Instead, the disposable one was Justine Greening, a woman, gay, modern, Rotherham-born, comprehensive-educated, the perfect image Tory detoxifiers claim to seek. But May couldn’t stomach Greening’s anti-grammar school, pragmatic approach to education. Briefings against Greening are typical of the nasty party: She was “slowing down the successful policies she inherited” — such as free schools. But having found that 62 free schools, universal technical colleges and studio schools have failed at a cost of £138.5 million (Dh688 million), it’s no surprise Greening lacked enthusiasm for the 500 more May had pledged by 2020. Spiteful briefers said she irritated the PM by talking too much at cabinet. The good thing? She may join the Soubry-Morgan-Clarke backbench crew of Brexit “mutineers”.
Sacking Greening and keeping Johnson signals how May can never modernise or detoxify: She is captive to her party and she is its membership personified, redolent of yesteryear. That is the spirit of Brexit — yearning to bring back pink maps and empire glory. Rectory daughter of the grammar school, she revels in her old blue passport. Can she bring back Spangles, Vim, Bunty, Green Shield stamps, cheese footballs and Friars Balsam to ease the wheeze from the polluting smog? Ah, how she breathes nostalgia — not prime minister of nowhere, but PM of an imagined yesterday.
She may be the most chic woman in politics, but modern necklaces belie a backward lean, like former British prime minister John Major’s bogus evocation of county cricket grounds, warm beer, pools fillers and Orwell’s old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist. So don’t look to her for renewal. David Lidington taking up Damian Green’s post coordinating cabinet committees? A new chairman, deputy and a flotilla of nine unpaid vice chairs to sort out the party after her terrible election campaign? Her choice for women is a throwback pro-lifer. Nothing to see here, let’s move on.
Tomorrow junior posts promise fresh blood, waving to the under 40s vote the Tories lost, hoping that one of them glimmers some leadership potential. Outside, the real world crowds in. The worst winter National Health Service crisis in two decades will yield landmines. Remember Mavis Skeet, whose death pole-axed former prime minister Tony Blair, or Jennifer’s ear in Major’s time? One totemic case may force the PM to abandon her absurd mantra that she has planned for this crisis. Indeed she has, it’s all hers and she will have to own it.
The long-grassed social care review, at the root of much of this, has popped up tagged on the end of Jeremy Hunt’s health department . Powers taken from local councils? Is there any idea how to pay for it? Meanwhile, a sinister phalanx of Tory lobbies press for a royal commission on NHS funding, led by the Thatcherite Centre for Policy Studies, Maurice Saatchi, the Sun, the Telegraph, the Mail and assorted Conservatives.
Forget that the NHS is under-funded as never before, it’s time for top-up fees, private insurance, means-testing and other ideological demolitions of a universal service. Note the upsurge of ads for private health insurance: “Welcome to a hospital with no waiting lists.” The devil finds work for idle governments short on ideas.
Look at the economy. Brexiters can’t hide our steep fall from the top of the G7 growth league before the referendum, to bottom of it now, as the Eurozone and global economy lift off without us. Sterling plunged and car sales fell while shares boomed irrationally sky high. True, no Brexit Armageddon arrived — but nor has Brexit, yet.
What has she to say about threats too big to think about? From the climate and Trump’s nuclear button to Russian subs hovering over the Atlantic internet cable, where are her ideas?
In the Downing Street grid, May pencils in eye-catching announcements to distract us. Environment is first up on tomorrow: She has trailed a tax on single-use plastic, no doubt a good thing. But Michael Gove’s attempt at greening himself is one of the great political comic turns of our not very funny era — wild flower-lover and puppy protector-in-chief.
Housing is due a boost now communities secretary Sajid Javid has that title added to his. Will he take the £10 billion wasted on help-to-buy schemes that flows straight into building bosses’ bonuses and redirect it towards freeing councils to build new homes?
Beyond Brexit, this government is running on empty. Those “burning injustices” May spoke of a year ago only worsen with each set of figures on stagnant incomes, poverty, social immobility and FTSE 100 chief executives earning 120 times average pay. Expect very little, as keeping the chancellor in post signifies she wants no change to austerity stretching into the desert Brexit years ahead.
But cheer up, there will be jollity in President Trump’s visit. The Mail reports he will bring a good trade deal if he gets an invitation to Harry and Meghan’s wedding. On such febrile things our fate depends.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist.
