theresa may: is her project subtly machiavellian or merely cunning, baldrick-style?

i think my basic intuition -- since roughly the time i began this thread -- is that, smart or dumb, the tories have zugwanged themselves, that their high poll points are almost entirely the ppl of the uk thinking "ok we're fucked, but at least SOMEONE seems to have a plan, whatever it might be" i.e. really as brittle as this (tho not harmed by the sense that there are no rival plans on offer) (ie the centre has no plan and the corbyn front, if it has a plan, has not communicated it to, well, certainly not to the ppl of the uk as a whole) (shall we just say)

but in fact the moment the plan arrives it falls apart -- and i suspect the disillusionment is kind of already deeply there, lurking unexpressed, which is why its manifested so intensely on such a shallow-seeming pretext

That seems otm.

The vote doesn't have many places to go right now though, does it?

yeah, that's a strength till it's not any more -- it's the thinking that shafted nu-labour

This is pretty illuminating
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n06/david-runciman/do-your-homework

Her time in the coalition was remarkable for the number of bitter personal disputes she had with fellow ministers. Many of these were over the issue of immigration. She came into a department that was pre-committed by the Conservative manifesto to bringing annual immigration down to ‘the tens of thousands’ from the hundreds of thousands it had been under Labour. Her colleagues, including Cameron, didn’t seem to have thought about whether this was a realistic target and assumed that if it wasn’t it would have to be fudged. May had no intention of fudging it, to the increasing consternation of the people who had landed her with the task. It is far from clear she believed it was good policy. That wasn’t the issue. It was now her policy and she would see it through.

whole essay is really interesting -- runciman at ruminative length is generally v good value, certainly for an "insider"

i've never seen even the beginnings of a political point made of the fact that a political leader's forebears were in service (inc.a great-grandfather who was a butler): possibly bcz for some decades the idea had just become a dismissive joke abt the long-lost past (even tho it must be true of many ppl)

so just as brexit is the UK finally ruinously forced to reckon with empire and the delusions we've fostered to look well in its aftermath, may as pm is the UK reckoning with the hidden aftermath of the empire class structure at home? (not that runciman openly goes there, it's a point he makes in glancing w/o even quite noticing where it could lead, i think)

(what i'm getting at is the secret history of a class subculture entirely fashioned round getting essential things done effectively and INVISIBLY, by a sector within the amorphous idea of the lower middle classes as a whole, which is actually -- almost by definition -- culturally and affectively cut off from the rest of the lower middle classes, let alone the other classes) (i think you'd have to turn to fiction to really dig into it: remains of the day, dorothy sayers, lol wodehouse even: the revenant politics of JEEVESIAN RESSENTIMENT…)

This piece is terrific, just got to this part:

Within twenty minutes of her arrival in Number Ten, May had summoned Osborne to sack him. Accounts of this meeting differ. Osborne’s people say it was cordial. But May’s people, who include Fiona Hill, now safely back in the fold, let it be known that the new prime minister gave him a severe dressing-down, telling him he had overpromised and underdelivered on the economy. What is clear is that Osborne had little idea how much she loathed him. He had thought that their previous disputes were just part of the cut and thrust of high politics and easily put behind them. That’s precisely what she loathed about him. She hates the idea that politics is just a game, which is what she suspects the Cameroons have always believed. She dispatched Gove with equal relish, telling him she couldn’t stomach his betrayal of Boris Johnson in the leadership contest. In truth, this was the least of it: what she really despised was Gove’s long-standing habit of making it up as he went along. Many observers were surprised when she brought Johnson back as foreign secretary, given that they too had previous from his time as mayor of London, when they had fallen out over his attempt to usurp her authority by purchasing three water cannon from Germany to help keep public order in the capital. The difference is that Johnson never tried to put her in her place; if anything, it was the other way round, after she blocked the use of the water cannon and then told him off about it in the Commons, where he couldn’t answer back. The public tends to see Johnson as the ultimate clown politician, all stunts and no substance. That’s not the way May sees it. For her it was Cameron, Osborne and Gove who were fundamentally unserious, because they were the ones who made promises they couldn’t keep. Johnson had the advantage of never having his promises believed in the first place.

Good piece ty

Deciding that something is your policy and you are going to stick to it no matter what, regardless of whether or not you even agree with it, strikes me as a gigantic psychological flaw in a politician. Let alone one who is charged with leading the single most challenging diplomatic task the UK has made in half a century.

heath, thatcher, major and now may all leaders from a lower middle-class* background arriving with a degree of embedded contempt for those who would thoughtlessly and blithely consider themselves their "betters" (though all of them i think negotiated this complicated fact in different ways)

cameron was an outlier in modern terms, last toff tory leader was alec douglas hume, whose place in history is somewhere between footnote and joke (and cam may well join him here)

*i once heard a tory grandee on the telly describing heath's accent as "working class" which spun my head round a bit, but maps something out abt relations in the party -- and major's class background is famously hard to get a clear sociological read on

Interesting article - but it goes way off-track when it talks about her advantages and compares her to Trump:

...the question voters ask of any leader is: ‘Do I like this person?’ But it seems more likely that the question at the back of their minds is: ‘Would this person like me?’ Cameron did OK on that score – better than Ed Miliband – because many voters suspected he would at least be polite and try to conceal any awkwardness he felt. But May is a natural. Weirdly, she has this in common with Trump, with whom she perhaps shares more than meets the eye. Trump too, for all his manifold unpleasantness, does a good job of seeming to be non-judgmental when it comes to his voting public. He is unspeakable to his fellow politicians, to the press, to his employees, to immigrants and to the women who are unfortunate enough to appear to him worth coveting. But to anyone who doesn’t fall into those categories, he might seem like a good person to hang out with.

I don't think anyone would think she's "a natural" . Her basic appeal for those who like her seems to be, as Mark S flagged, is that she has the image of having a 'plan' (whatever that might be) and an aura of hard-work and 'getting on the the job'.

yes i was going to say, the trump comparison seems weirdly strained -- he's looking to explain TM's sky-high polling obviously, but of course trump's polling ISN'T sky-high (especially in the UK, tho that's not really relevant to his point)

there's an element of the usual self-loathing westminster-bubble overcompensation here (runciman IS an insider after all): can't we pointy-headed elitists grasp that here is a pol that connects with [whatever the current buzzword for "real people out there who never munch" is]?

She has a lot in common with Major, not least that they made PM without having to face the electorate, but that in many ways they are the platonic ideal of a certain class of Tory. Workmanlike, unpretentious, small pleasures (Major's cricket/May's gardening) rather than flashy Blair/Cameron cosying up to cool Britannia, Tracey Emin et al.

*i once heard a tory grandee on the telly describing heath's accent as "working class" which spun my head round a bit, but maps something out abt relations in the party -- and major's class background is famously hard to get a clear sociological read on

assume this is from the Michael Cockerell documentary, iirc the grandee is an Oxford contemporary who, when asked about Heath being an atypical Oxford undergrad due to his class background, says something about him having "a pronounced cockney accent, which of course he retains to this day". I think this is followed by Cockerell relating this to observation to Heath and asking for his opinion, Heath seems visibly amused but doesn't go further than diplomatically/gently saying that he would not describe his accent as such.

I also remember reading a quote by someone to the effect that non-posh ppl of Heath's generation who made it to Oxford quickly tended to either attempt to assimilate and adopt the accent, mannerisms, dress sense etc of their upper-class collegues, or do the opposite and defiantly assert and empahsise their background, whereas Heath was unusual in that he did neither, didn't try to cling to his lower middle-class origins but also never seemed ashamed of or tried to disguise them. idk if being congenitally disconnected from humanity in general made it easier for him to adjust to being disconnected from his class via upward mobilty?

yes, you're quite right, it was was the documentary and it was "cockney accent" -- which is equally head-spinning of course

"was was the" s/b "was that"

heath, thatcher, major and now may all leaders from a lower middle-class* background arriving with a degree of embedded contempt for those who would thoughtlessly and blithely consider themselves their "betters" (though all of them i think negotiated this complicated fact in different ways)

Is being a vicar's daughter lower middle class?

According to Wikipedia, lower middle class = Hyacinth Bucket. That's useful.

I had a month of doing a liftshare with a middle-aged lower-middle-class conservative lady, it was quite a good experience in terms of hearing her explain her viewpoint and the reasoning behind it - not because this viewpoint is unrepresented (it most certainly isn't) but because it's so ubiquitous in the countryside in the south east that nobody ever feels they need to explain it from inside rather than outside.

Her assessment of Theresa May was that she seemed like a decent, professional person who was taking her job very seriously, working hard and standing up for the majority of people in the country. She had not heard anyone say that she was much worse at policy detail and negotiation than at internal party maneuvering. For my part all I could do was tell her my personal experiences of dealing with TM's immigration policies, how they had wrecked a year of my family's life for no conceivable reason, but not sure I made much headway - there are deeper prejudices underlying everything in this country, and I suspect that having a foreign wife and children makes me to some extent an outsider and an intruder, my experience less important than the majority who just want to get on with their lives and not worry about things changing.

I didn't tell her that I hate TM more than anyone in the world right now, though I do. Aside from everything she has done to me, she reminds me of a manager I had who steamrollered through "projects" with no regard to either peoples lives or measurable success. I find these sort of people the most insufferable on the planet, and would genuinely prefer a manager who was incompetent, didn't turn up or even was nakedly money-grasping.

xp
"economically secure, without being well-off" could probably describe some C of E vicars - I notice TM's old man had a side-gig as a chaplain. Probably a decent little 2nd income when you are already living rent free.

Vicars earn like £17k which is below a lot of entry-level office jobs but yeah it's hardly a precarious existence nonetheless.

low pay, free house, help with bills etc., flipside is that if you have to leave your job (or are squeezed out) you lose your house. it's a bit of an anomaly

i had may's grandparents in mind when i said that tbh: vicar is quite hard to place class-wise (as ppl note they're not paid much)

same as music hall performer/garden gnome purveyor maybe

could it be.. hear me out, now... that there was a time when social status was not entirely tied to income and/or wealth

i had may's grandparents in mind when i said that tbh

I did think that. Was it at an ILB FAP I was talking about my great-grandfather's strange double life as water board inspector/theatrical entrepreneur?

you did tom :)

true tracer, but May is only four years older than me -- the social status of vicars has inevitably drifted down with the cultural status of the church

i'm jumping in here cause my grandfather was a methodist minister, with many of the same parameters - house paid for, low salary. in his case he had to move every three or four years. when he arrived in one town, the story goes that the lay leaders in the congregation there told him part of the package was hay for his horses, should he want it. he said no, but he'd appreciate some gas for his chevrolet! BA DOOM. but anyway what i'm getting at is that he enjoyed quite a bit of prestige in each of these small towns. i imagine rural texas has a few differences with the cotswolds, mind you...

my memory of a small shropshire village is that there was quite a shift even between the early 70s and the late -- the elderly incumbent when we first moved there (who had been in role for years) had a heft, despite fraility, that younger successors never achieved

there's a line in kipling's stalky where one of the boys -- heir to thousands of irish acres -- responds to a teacher chastising him, in a tone that says [from memory] "you are but an usher hired to interpret the classics to me" -- this jumped into my head as i was trying to capture the attitude the more landed locals had to the younger successors, it overstates it but it was there (it doesn't help that the one i particularly have in mind was a fluting idiot)

wouldn't say the prestige/weird respect/fear afforded to clergy in the UK has many if any tangible benefits for their families

Wasn't the villager C of E tradition to hand a vicarage to the effete third or fourth son of some local lord or baronet, kind of a loads of class but no money scenario?

... and no brains either.

The Very Rev. Tim Nice-but-Dim

not exactly: back in the first half of the 19th century, a third son of the aristocracy would probably be steered towards the church (second went into the military) -- but this meant bishops not vicars on the whole, and didn't survive into the 20th century (also you p much had to pass exams to go into the church from the 18th century onwards, not all effect sons of baronets could manage this)

the early part of james woodforde's diary of a country parsonage is about securing the money to live as he wanted -- it's basically family money and he was very uncertain that any of it would come his way (in the end i think some did)… it mainly went on staff and upkeep of the parsonage ands its lands AND of the church (these were often in terrible condition)

(lol i read this bcz it was an xmas present to me from the father of my first gf: it is interesting though on daily life -- woodforde ate a COLOSSAL amount of meat and his daily regime included five regular meals a day)

effect = effete

My knowledge of C of E vicars is largely based on Kind Hearts and Coronets tbf.

Anglicanism is a mystery to me, frankly.

if Fielding's to be believed then the majority of country parishes where low-paid and low-prestige in the 18th century, I suspect that's generally been true of the church's foot soldiers throughout its existence

My cousin is married to the dean of the next parish over. Seems about the most middle-class existence imaginable, albeit without any money, though i don't know if Eastbourne is notably different from slightly further inland.

That LRB article is really great. Lots to digest and actually the curious class/wealth position of the English clergy seems to explain a lot about how May's been received even though she hasn't had to explicitly define herself in those terms.

(As the son of a rural CoE vicar it is surprisingly difficult to actually explain those terms: yes, social status with no actual money is completely true, but there's this incredibly weird way in which clergy families are both integral to and separated from rural communities - ie regardless of actual church attendance or belief the idea that the vicar is some sort of figurehead is crucial, but due to the nature of clergy work and the tortuous politics of rural parishes I think most clergy families deliberately (possibly are told??) don't socialise with their parishioners or educate their kids at the village school etc - and doubtless there's an element of snobbery here too. But maybe more to the point w/r/t the acceptance of May by the rural Tory grassroots is that the "clergy family" as an institution might float slightly above the rest of the community, might invite a weird kind of deference (or outright hatred if village politics end up that way) but it's such a known, familiar factor compared to eg Cameron's PR career. This is kind of garbled, it's weirdly hard to explain when you've lived through it.)

my experience again -- so very much not trying to trump lex's -- but "deference" isn't quite the word: more like an unquestioned pre-set recognition that this was a person who was going to be included in all kinds of events and discussions (social and occasionally local-political), and was often practically speaking going to given the final say as of right (even if the decision wasn't one which this or that senior villager at all liked)

Don't some vicars get assistance with private school places, to avoid kids at local schools?

yeah that's right, deference isn't quite the word but I couldn't think of any other

xp and yes, though I don't think that was the stated reason

lots of private schools -- many of which are religious foundations historically -- have long-standing little scholarships available for the children of parents of various backgrounds, via old-pupil bequests and such

the money involved is mostly pretty limited though, in relation to modern-day fees for such schools (and the child in question will also have to pass the entrance exams same as everyone else, so it's not a stress-free shoo-in necessarily)

https://mobile.twitter.com/1030/status/848953002706829314

^ Hysterical.

further subterranean evidence the snap election was more about panic than planning as two of the top figures in may's communications team (katie perrior and lizzie loudon) quit within three days of one another

She has been so smug and triumphalist in the past week, it is good to see some trouble at t'mill.

They're likely to run a shambolic campaign- May herself is a very awkward performer in the spotlight and won't enjoy the next few weeks at all. But it probly won't make much difference :-(

http://cdn2.theweek.co.uk/sites/theweek/files/2017/02/170216-may_0.jpg

what a natural, Obama crossed with Princess Di right there