How May brought Britain to heel

Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister, it is safe to say, wouldn’t have been caught dead in a pair of trousers. Her successor as a leader of Britain’s Conservative Party and current Prime Minister, Theresa May, is far more adventurous. When she made her bid to head the country’s main centre-right party last summer, she was wearing a tartan pantsuit by the one-time high priestess of punk, Vivienne Westwood. Westwood’s label is mainstream these days, but it was still a bold choice for a would-be Tory prime minister.

Some months later, May lounged on a sofa in a pair of leather trousers for an interview at the end of the momentous year that saw her move into No 10 Downing Street. But why am I even talking about the prime minister’s wardrobe when she has called a snap general election for June 8?

This is the first time in three decades that a mainstream British political party has gone to the polls with both a female leader and a serious expectation of winning. Isn’t it demeaning, not to say sexist, to focus on how she dresses?

The problem for feminists like me, who would normally leap to a female politician’s defence, is that May would never complain about any of this attention. She gives every impression of liking it. The public probably knows more about what she wears than it does about her policies, confirming just about every sexist stereotype.

Women and shoes, huh? But to dismiss any discussion of May’s careful cultivation of image as trivialising or gender-biased is to miss how strategic she is. Her famous leopard-print heels have long been a form of camouflage, usefully diverting attention when she has unpalatable things to say (which isn’t very often). They made one of their first outings at the Conservative Party Conference in 2002, when May told activists they needed to stop earning their reputation as “the nasty party”. She discovered just how easy it is to distract Britain’s popular press with an unexpected choice of accessory.

In the opening weeks of this election campaign, all we learned about Britain’s second female prime minister is that she utters the words “strong and stable” at every opportunity. Public appearances have been carefully choreographed: Typically, a tour of a factory filled with supporters, with the media kept well away.

And it has worked. May’s personal popularity is at stratospheric levels, with some opinion polls suggesting she is even more popular than Thatcher was in her heyday. Perhaps the prime minister was channeling her inner Iron Lady when she stood at a lectern in Downing Street recently and scolded the leaders of the European Union (EU), demonstrating how effectively she hid her true colours in the past: She, too, can be nasty when she needs to be.

It is becoming clear that May’s political views are farther to the Right than her reassuring presence — the head teacher who always has time to discuss little Johnny or Jessica’s problems — would have us believe. When May was home secretary and in charge of Britain’s borders, she supported a wildly optimistic policy of the then prime minister, David Cameron, who wanted to reduce immigration to a few tens of thousands a year. That undertaking was an abject failure by any standards — net immigration last year was just under 275,000 — but it doesn’t seem to have done her much harm.

May has corrected course by adopting an even tougher stance on the international refugee crisis than Cameron. In February, she cancelled the government’s commitment to allow 3,000 unaccompanied refugee children into Britain after only about 350 had arrived. She has proved adept at shifting position without incurring political damage. Last summer, she supported the Remain side in the referendum on Britain’s membership in the EU, but she did it so quietly that she succeeded in seamlessly manoeuvring into being the best-placed candidate to lead the tricky Brexit negotiations after Leave won.

For feminists, May is no less troubling a figure than Thatcher was, embodying many of the same contradictions. The fact that the current leader has been called “Maggie May” by the popular press is chiefly a reminder that there are still too few role models for powerful women.

In the 1980s, the media routinely sexualised Thatcher in under-the-radar ways. For a generation of upper-middle-class men who had grown up with nannies and school matrons, Thatcher evoked a potent mix of anxiety and fantasy.

The subtle edginess of May’s personal style seems to wink at this role of national dominatrix. Those leopard-print shoes of hers inspired a notorious photomontage in The Sun, a top-selling British tabloid, that showed a similar pair crushing the heads of Tory men under the headline “Heel, Boys.”

And she has done nothing to discourage the toxic sexism that swirls about her. When the Daily Mail provoked outrage by publishing a photo of her with the First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, under the brazenly sexist headline ‘Never mind Brexit, who won Legs-it!’ the prime minister’s spokesman refused to comment. For her part, Sturgeon was furious and said so.

When United States President Donald Trump met with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, he conspicuously declined to shake hands and avoided eye contact. In stark contrast, when the president first met May in Washington in January, he grabbed her hand in full view of the cameras. This was a power play none of her ministers back home would dare to attempt, yet May did not demur.

She has done little to challenge even the most hoary, outdated assumptions. When she took part in a rare joint TV interview with her husband, Philip, last week, she caused astonishment by saying that they divide household chores, such as taking the trash out, into “boy jobs and girl jobs”. Such attitudes speak volumes about the social values of the Conservative Party and the insularity of British politics.

May is more modern in her attitudes than some in her party — and undeniably more collegial than Cameron, let alone Thatcher. May has promoted women to top posts in her cabinet and has a long-standing interest in preventing domestic violence. Yet, she presides over a government that has pursued a dismantling of public services that disproportionately affects women. And the calling card she used to signal a break with the stuffy Tory past — the eye-catching footwear, the leather trousers — has now returned to haunt public life with unsavoury, sexualised expectations of women at the highest level of politics.

This is all the more disappointing at a moment when the Conservative Party has overturned the traditional order of British politics by fielding a competent, personable woman against a male opposition leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who looks and sounds like a throwback to the 1970s. May’s refusal to confront the infantile misogyny of the media leaves her open to the accusation that she got where she is not by challenging patriarchy, but by colluding with it. What does it say about gender equality in Britain that the politician tipped to win by a landslide in next month’s election is most famous for her footwear?

— New York Times News Service

Joan Smith is a novelist and the author of the nonfiction books Misogynies: Reflections on Myths and Malice and The Public Woman.