May goes not with a bang, but with a whimper
This time next week Theresa May will be embarking on her first weekend out of office. Her successor, most likely Boris Johnson, will be settling into the sofa at Number Ten.
Prime Ministers, much like chief executives, can get obsessed about their legacy. City veteran Martin Gilbert once said that leaving is hard because when things are going well you don’t want to and when they’re going badly you can’t. This doesn’t always hold up.
Sometimes, as May found out, things get so bad that the only door open to you is the one marked exit.
The PM revealed this week that she announced her departure after assurances that doing so would yield enough votes to see her Brexit deal pass the Commons. It didn’t happen. “That’s politics,” she said.
The legacy issue has taken up much of her time since firing the starting gun on the race to find her successor. She’s talked about billions more for education, but chancellor Philip Hammond has denied her access to the Treasury purse.
She used her last speech as PM to share her thoughts on the state of our political discourse, but few were really listening. Attempting to engineer a legacy in the final days of a premiership is futile. A legacy builds over time, crystallising at the moment of departure but taking shape in the years and months leading up to it.
Despite her sweeping speech on the steps of Downing Street at the start of her time as PM, in which she pledged to tackle burning injustices, any sober analysis of her time in office will have to conclude that Brexit – and a failure to deliver it – is what she’ll be remembered for.
Historians may one day argue over whether she was uniquely to blame for this failure or just the Downing Street occupant lumbered with an impossible task, but if a conclusion emerges it wont change the fact that hers was a government both bewildered and beguiled by the task of extricating the UK from the European Union, and that either through accident or design very little else was achieved or even tackled.
It should, however, be acknowledged that no leader can be neatly categorised as either success or failure. Myriad decisions are made, many of which we won’t know about for years. Situations are confronted and defused, mini battles won and lost.
May has her defenders and they can’t all be wrong. One question is: will she be missed? The answer may depend upon who follows in her place.