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laura-elizabeth91 · 1 year ago

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Theresa May: Boris, Brexit and me

Four years and three prime ministers since she left Downing Street, Theresa May has written a book and loosened up (a bit). She tells Caroline Wheeler why she’ll never stop biting back from the back benches — and why Donald Trump wouldn’t let go of her hand

heresa May’s political awakening came when she was about seven years old. “I have a distinct memory of there being a knock at the door one evening and the door being opened to two chaps, one of whom had a big blue rosette on,” she recalls. She later learnt this was Neil Marten, the Conservative MP for Banbury, Oxfordshire, near where the May family lived. “My father took him and the chap who was with him into the sitting room and I went to join them and the door was shut firmly in my face. I was told, ‘No, this wasn’t for children. This was an adult thing.’ And maybe being shut out of the debate was the first spark.”

The daughter of a vicar, she was 12 or 13 when she decided she wanted to go into politics. “I just woke up one day and thought, actually I’d like to be an MP. I think that being an MP can be as much a vocation as being a teacher and I suppose perhaps [that idea] had been generated by an upbringing of public service.”

May became the country’s second female prime minister when she entered Downing Street on July 13, 2016, in the wake of the Brexit vote and David Cameron’s resignation. She lasted three years, announcing her resignation in May 2019 after failing to get her Brexit deal through parliament and her party performing poorly in the European elections. She left office on July 24, succeeded by Boris Johnson, the nemesis who plotted her downfall.

May says her resignation speech was the only time she ever displayed emotion publicly. “It wasn’t crying exactly, but when I gave my speech outside No 10 my voice sort of cracked a bit. I went back into No 10 and Gavin Barwell, who was my chief of staff, came out and said, ‘Well done.’ I said, ‘No, my voice went at the end and I’m really annoyed at myself,’ and he said, ‘No, no. That shows good emotion.’ ”

Since then the politician formerly known as the Maybot — for her sometimes robotic answers to questions — seems to be living something closer to her best life, making careful interventions from the back benches on the Sue Gray report into the lockdown-breaking parties held across Whitehall and retaining the protections her government introduced on modern slavery; and, once, wearing a glittering ballgown to the vote of confidence in Johnson in June last year. (She was on her way to speak at a dinner marking the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee — and has never disclosed which way she voted.)

In the weeks after she left No 10, on a walking holiday in the Swiss Alps with her husband, Philip, May first had the idea for a book. It would pull together the threads of many issues she had dealt with, first as home secretary and then as PM. Out next month, it is called The Abuse of Power, a concept she defines as institutions of the state and those that work within them putting themselves first — way ahead of the people they are there to serve.

With a title like that you might expect it to be payback time on Johnson, but the index points to just 13 fleeting references to her fellow former prime minister. Indeed, the closest she gets to score-settling is an attack on John Bercow, the former Speaker (and Remain supporter), whom she accuses of carrying out the biggest abuse of power she witnessed during the Brexit impasse over Northern Ireland: “We got to a point where the DUP were being positive. We were actually at the point of them being willing to say they would support the deal. The normal processes went on in terms of going to the Speaker to talk about the motion, and he wouldn’t let us put the motion down. So that meant we couldn’t have the debate, we couldn’t have the vote, and by the time we did the DUP had changed [their mind]. And so there was a point we could have had a vote to do Brexit on the basis of the deal. He took a decision that meant that didn’t go ahead.”

Bercow certainly added to the pressure on May, amid claims he was working with opposition MPs to thwart Brexit, but with the numbers stacked against her in the Commons, it is likely that even without his intervention she would have struggled to get her Brexit deal through.

Instead, her book focuses on events outside the chamber, including the Hillsborough stadium disaster, on which she commissioned Bishop James Jones to conduct a report in the wake of the verdicts of unlawful killing in the second inquest; the police cover-up over the murder of the private investigator Daniel Morgan; and the Grenfell fire. The book is dedicated to her parents, whom she says taught her the “meaning of service”. They both died before they could see her become an MP.

When I arrive at her house in the village of Sonning in her Maidenhead constituency, where she has lived for 27 years, May, 66, is in the kitchen discussing recipes with her aide. She has plucked one of hundreds of cookery books from her shelves and is leafing through it. In the centre of the sage-green room, which has large windows overlooking a well-kept garden, is a wooden table where we make ourselves comfortable. Philip, 65, a now-retired investment manager, pops his head round the door. The pair, who met at Oxford and have been married for 43 years, chat for a few moments, finishing each other’s sentences, before he scurries away to find a more private corner of the house.

May was born in Eastbourne, East Sussex, in 1956, the only child of Zaidee and Hubert Brasier, who was a Church of England vicar and the chaplain of a hospital. After studying at Holton Park Grammar School, which became the Wheatley Park comprehensive while she was there, May went on to study geography at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. She then worked at the Bank of England and the Association for Payment Clearing Services.

After two unsuccessful attempts to enter parliament, at 40 May became the Conservative MP for Maidenhead in 1997 as Tony Blair’s Labour Party swept to power. She spent much of the next 13 years on the shadow front bench. In 2010, when the coalition government won power, Cameron appointed her as his home secretary — only the second woman to hold that great office of state. She became the longest-serving home secretary in more than a century.

“They always say you had to be a communist in your youth, a socialist in your young adulthood and a Conservative as you got older,” she says. “I’ve always been a Conservative.” Her upbringing taught her the “importance of the freedom of individuals”. “It was the sense that, actually, how far you’re going in life is down to you. It’s about your talents and your willingness to work hard. To me the Conservative Party always provided the better environment in which people could succeed.” Her mother wanted her to be a nun. Did she ever entertain the idea? “No, absolutely not!”

Aside from Geoffrey Boycott, her cricketing hero, May’s father was her biggest inspiration. “His absolute conviction was that he was there for everybody who lived in his parish; I’m there for everybody who lives in my constituency. To him it was regardless of whether they were coming to his church or not. For me it’s regardless of how somebody has voted. Once you’re in that position you’re there to support and help them, to work for them.”

Growing up as the daughter of a vicar, she says, isn’t so different from being the child of a politician. “There was a combination there of public service and public speaking. In the vicarage there was very much a sense that we were there for other people.”

With such responsibility on young shoulders, did she ever feel the need to rebel? May famously claimed the naughtiest thing she had ever done was run through a field of wheat. “I haven’t had a rebellious childhood and suddenly transformed,” she says. She has also admitted that her guilty pleasure is eating peanut butter straight from the jar. “There’s no transformation on peanut butter — there’s a jar in the cupboard!”

In 1981, a year after her marriage to Philip, her father was driving to a nearby church to conduct the Sunday evening service when he was in a collision with a Range Rover on the A40. He died of head and spine injuries. A few months later May’s mother, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, also died. At the age of 25 May was an orphan. “I suppose it made me even more want to do something that they would have been proud of. Even though they wouldn’t see it.”

However much May might want her legacy to be the legislation she introduced for net zero emissions by 2050, or the Modern Slavery Act — which created new duties and powers to protect victims and prosecute offenders — she knows her premiership will always be seen through the prism of Brexit. She voted to remain in the EU and now believes her life in Downing Street would have been easier if she had been a Brexiteer.

“I don’t think it would have been easier on the negotiation side, but I do think — when I look back on it — that there were some of my colleagues who were Brexiteers who found it difficult to think that a Remainer would actually deliver Brexit,” she says.

Although she claims she is not trying to blame others for her mistakes, May believes her failure to get her Brexit deal through parliament was due in large part to people putting their personal interests above those of the country. “I started off with the view that we had to find a way of doing Brexit that recognised the concerns of the 48 per cent who voted Remain,” she says. “It became this atmosphere of both Brexiteers and Remainers trying to get what was their absolute aim, rather than a compromise that would better suit everybody.”

There were also serious global events for May to grapple with. She was the first world leader to meet President Trump when she travelled to Washington in January 2017, days after his inauguration. The visit took a bizarre twist when photographs emerged of Trump holding her hand as they walked through the White House.

“I have no idea why he did it. I mean, he sort of said, ‘Oh, there’s a slope so you need to be careful on the slope.’ Now whether this is because Melania always wears very high heels or not, I don’t know. I had heeled shoes on but they weren’t high heels. I thought, ‘I’m capable of walking down a slope, thank you very much,’ and the next thing I know he’s holding my hand.” She adds, laughing: “The best interpretation is he’s being a gentleman. But subsequently a lot of people said maybe he needed the support going down the slope. I don’t know. He just grabbed my hand and I thought he would then let go of it, but he didn’t.”

May’s tone becomes more serious when discussing the abuses of power Trump would go on to commit. She describes the storming of the Capitol building in January 2021 as “a wake-up call for us all”. “If you look over the years since the Second World War, there was a sense that liberal democracy was going to be sweeping the world, almost, and it was there and it was embedded and we could take it for granted. I think what happened at Capitol Hill showed that we can’t take it for granted.”

In 2018 she expelled 23 Russian diplomats after an attempt by Vladimir Putin’s regime to assassinate a former spy, Sergei Skripal, on British soil — in Salisbury — with the nerve agent novichok. She says this was the “right message” to send Putin. “In terms of the invasion of Ukraine, we have to look back to Crimea, and even before that to Georgia in 2008. I think arguably the West’s response did suggest to him that the West wasn’t willing to stand up for its values. The West turned its attention to China. So Putin, I think, felt that the West was more divided, wasn’t as coherent in terms of its support for its own western values. I think that all built up into an opportunity for him and he took it.”

Since the invasion, she says, “what’s happened is that the West did come together, the West did show its willingness to support its values, and rather than the division of Nato he’s seeing the expansion of Nato. He’s seeing the West made more coherent and he’s seeing the numbers of troops that Nato are willing to put on his border increase. So he has actually achieved the opposite of what he wanted.”

May’s premiership could have taken a different course had she achieved the landslide victory she had been on track to deliver after calling a snap election in April 2017. For much of the campaign she enjoyed a double-digit poll lead over Labour. But her manifesto pledge on social care, nicknamed the dementia tax, was widely blamed for extinguishing her lead.

May claims the decision to call the election was down to timing, as she was concerned that leaving it any later would have seen an election follow hard on the heels of the UK leaving the EU. “I was obviously extremely disappointed with the results. Surprised, because we’d thought that we would be able to get Labour Leave voters to switch, in order to get Brexit done.

“What happened in the 2019 general election [when Johnson’s Conservatives won 365 seats to Labour’s 202] was what we had expected to happen in the 2017 general election,” May reflects. “What we hadn’t realised is [the Labour leader Jeremy] Corbyn hadn’t shown quite sufficient negativity to Brexit that the Labour Leave voters decided to switch [to the Tories], which they did of course by 2019.”

Did she consider resigning in 2017?

“I felt I’d started something and I wanted to finish it. I said, ‘Look, I got us into this, I’m going to work to get us out.’ ”

May gently chides me for asking if she cried as she saw her majority evaporate, pointing out this is not a question that would ever be asked of a man. “I think often with women politicians, people want to pigeon-hole them. It’s either ‘You’re so soft that you shouldn’t be doing the job’, or ‘You’re a real hard harridan’, like they did with Thatcher. I didn’t feel discriminated against in the sense that most people would describe as discrimination. As with the Maybot thing, there is a different approach taken to women politicians.”

Disappointingly May today is wearing an uncontroversial turquoise cotton dress, not the £995 chocolate-coloured Amanda Wakeley leather trousers she wore the last time she was interviewed for The Sunday Times Magazine in 2016. “All those comments about ‘How does she spend so much on leather trousers?’ — they were lent to me for the shoot! It only goes to show how sometimes women are judged in different ways from men.”

She is used to the slings and arrows. At a crucial Tory party conference in Manchester in October 2017 she had a coughing fit as letters from the slogan behind her (“Building a country that works for everyone”) fell slowly from the wall, and was interrupted by a prankster waving a P45. A year on, in Birmingham, not long after the quality of her dance moves on an official trip to Kenya had been criticised, she hit back by strutting onto the stage to Dancing Queen.

One image that will for ever be associated with May’s premiership is the Grenfell tower block in west London engulfed in flames. At 12.54am on June 14, 2017, the fire brigade was called to the blaze in Kensington. Within half an hour the flames of the burning tower lit up the night sky. Seventy-two people died. May was still exhausted in the aftermath of the election six days before. “I remember the next morning standing with private secretaries in the outer office just looking at the television screen,” she says. “The building was still burning. You almost couldn’t comprehend that this had actually happened.”

She was criticised for failing to meet victims during her first visit to the site, but returned to Grenfell to meet them privately in the days and months afterwards. “I think it’s so important because often what happens is you get an event like that, a tragedy like that, and politicians turn up on day one, in my case day two, and when the photos are taken and so forth, they go away and nothing more is heard from them.”

Grenfell touched a nerve with May because, she says, it appeared to be the physical manifestation of many of the “burning injustices” she had vowed to correct during her first speech as prime minister. The abuse of power here was the “belittling of a group of people because they happened to live in homes owned in part by the state. Those people living there felt they’d been beating their head against the brick wall of authority for many years in regards safety of the building.”

May had pledged to make Britain a country that “works not for a privileged few, but for every one of us”. This included plans to tackle the lack of affordable housing, fixing broken markets to help with the cost of living and stamping out racial and class disparities. “I think there were important things that I was able to do that addressed some of the specific social injustices. Setting up the Race Disparity Unit [which collects, analyses and publishes government data on the experiences of people from different ethnic backgrounds], for example, and recognising that a significant part of our population have often had a very different experience of living in the UK from the rest of us.”

As part of my trip to Maidenhead I join May on a visit to Thames Hospice. She is a frequent visitor to the bright, airy building overlooking a sailing lake, and was there when the Queen opened it in July last year — one of her last public events before she died in September.

It is impossible to miss the broad smile breaking across the face of Aaron Sennick, a 20-year-old with complex medical conditions, when he sees May. At one point he gushes: “Thank you for everything you have done for this country.” May looks more comfortable sitting beside Aaron’s bedside than she ever did at the dispatch box.

Aaron regales her with stories of his voluntary work and his burgeoning social media career. In return May tells him she is a technophobe and has only in the past few months given up her beloved BlackBerry and switched to an iPhone. He asks about her favourite memory as prime minister. May reveals it was in 2018 when she met the British diving team who had rescued a young football team from a cave in Thailand. She tells Aaron that she often found the most special moments were when ordinary people were recognised and celebrated for doing extraordinary things.

She is planning to fight the next election but is happy away from the front benches. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for prime ministers to go back,” she says. “I had 13 years in opposition — 12 of those on the front bench and then nine years on the front bench in government. So actually it has been rather nice to go back to the back benches and to do the job of being a constituency MP.”

After she left Downing Street, her husband, Philip, was awarded a knighthood in recognition of his political service. He was nominated by Johnson. Although his title means that his wife is now Lady May, she does not use it. May remains tight-lipped on whether this is because she is waiting for a peerage of her own.

“I think there is a need for PMs to think very carefully about the numbers that they’re putting into the Lords,” she says — the closest she gets to possible criticism of Johnson, who created 87 new peers during his tenure as prime minister (and awarded 7 more in his resignation honours), compared with May’s 43. “I actively tried to ensure that I restricted my list throughout my time as PM,” she says. Liz Truss’s list, after her 49-day premiership, is imminent.

Despite Truss crashing the economy, does May think Rishi Sunak can deliver on his promises and win the next election? “What people want to see is a prime minister — which they are seeing in Rishi — who has understood issues that matter to them and is putting in place what he believes will deliver on those issues,” she says. “We all know in politics that other things happen that can knock you off course, but I think what people want to see is that you are actively doing your best to deliver.”

May says she is “very pleased” that Sunak has not yet swayed from the 2050 net zero target she introduced, insisting that net zero is “the most important economic opportunity of the 21st century”. She adds: “Lots of people talk about the costs but don’t talk about what would net off those costs in terms of positives for the economy, for jobs, for people and so forth. There is a road in Maidenhead that is social housing that recycles rainwater — it has ferns on the roof to capture the rainwater better and so forth. It has all sorts of energy-efficient elements and the people who live there have seen their energy bills go down significantly. So I always say that what’s good for the planet can be good for your pocket.”

She says the argument will not be made by “lecturing people”. “We won’t achieve net zero if all we do is tell people you can’t fly, you can’t drive, you can’t eat meat. Actually, what we’ve got to do is say, you can play your role, your part in a number of different ways on a day-to-day basis. Government must play its part and business must play its part as well.” She adds: “If you look at everything that’s coming out of the Climate Change Committee and so forth, we really do have to address this issue. You can’t get to 2048 and say, Ooh right, we’ve got a target in two years’ time, let’s do this because that would be even costlier.”

May is less supportive of Sunak’s plans to remove the protections for victims of slavery who enter Britain illegally, and she defied a three-line whip after a debate on the issue in July. “My key concern is around modern slavery,” she says. “Because if we’re going to stop it we need to break the business model. That means catching perpetrators. To catch perpetrators you need victims to be willing to come forward, identify themselves and give evidence and I worry that what’s now in the Illegal Migration Act, and indeed the Nationality and Borders Act, together will lead to a situation where fewer victims will come forward.” She is preparing to launch a global commission on modern slavery, made up of CEOs, former world leaders, academics and civil society leaders. “There’s a sort of unfortunate thing in politics that politicians will often focus on one big thing at one point and then something else happens and the energy goes out of the first thing,” she says.

However, May will combine her new role with being a backbench MP. Even as prime minister she would go knocking on doors as often as she could in her constituency. Why? “You should never forget that even if you get to the very top job you’re only there because you have been elected as an MP.”

In her book, in one of the few passages to mention Johnson by name, she writes: “Another source of anger was the perception that somehow MPs were able to get away with breaking the sort of rules which they would expect everyone else to follow. This was to have another manifestation under Boris Johnson’s premiership, when those in 10 Downing Street and elsewhere in Whitehall were found to have broken Covid pandemic lockdown rules. The idea that there has been one rule for the public and another for MPs provokes public cynicism and leads increasingly to the charge of hypocrisy. In other words, why should we do what you say when you don’t do it yourself? Above all, it shatters any sense that MPs are leaders in society. Yet I still believe we have a responsibility to try to show such leadership. It may be harder in today’s world, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.”

May believes that in order to restore integrity to politics, there needs to be an understanding that being a politician is a position of public service rather than power. “What you fundamentally need is for MPs not to think that they’re a species apart simply because they’ve been elected,” she says. “It’s that sense that, for some MPs, they are in a position of power because they’ve been elected, that they’re special, that they are a breed set apart. I think we have to change that thinking because, basically, being an MP is a job.”

The Abuse of Power by Theresa May (Headline £25). Read an exclusive extract in The Times tomorrow.

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qudachuk · 2 years ago

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Former No 10 chief of staff Gavin Barwell says decision by PM and Cabinet Office undermines confidence in the inquiryGood morning and welcome to the UK politics live blog. We begin with news that the government has made a...

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generalelectionmusings · 5 years ago

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#grenfell #uk #disgusting #peerage #gavin barwell #politics #corrupt #tory #conservative #justice for grenfell #theresa may

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votenet-blog · 6 years ago

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'No solutions' to Irish backstop in May's Brexit call with cabinet

‘No solutions’ to Irish backstop in May’s Brexit call with cabinet

Author: Heather Stewart / Source: the Guardian

Theresa May is expected to reject calls to forge a cross-party consensus on Brexit when she lays out her plan B to parliament on Monday, choosing instead to back new diplomatic efforts in Brussels to renegotiate the Irish backstop.

The prime minister held a conference call with her bitterly divided cabinet from the country retreat of Chequers on…

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#Brexit #Brussels #Conservative Party (UK)#Downing Street #Gavin Barwell #Irish people #Owen Paterson #Solution #Theresa May #Tory

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textsfromwestminsterredux · 8 years ago

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#chris lilley #gavin barwell

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captain-aralias · 2 years ago

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get to know me

these are some impressively unusual questions. let's do it! thanks for tagging me @themandilorian

relationship status: in a long-term relationship. we're not married, but likely to become so soon because.... we're going to try and have a baby, and it's much easier for two women to be legal parents if you're married. i thought i was quite into marriage for a long time, and lots of my fics are about it, but it turns out when push comes to shove, i find the idea of a party full of lots of people who dont really know each other, where you're the centre of attention, and it's still kind of weird for it to be gay when you aren't a sword lesbian/bisexual of the blade... unappealing. so - i keep putting it off.

favourite colour: yellow. i think i first decided i liked this colour best in part because the company joules did some very nice mustard-yellow clothes, but also because no one else liked it, so it was a good colour to choose for games. and now i just unironically like it.

favourite food: maybe salmon sashimi. or dark chocolate - i'm the kind of person who basically thinks all sweets that aren't chocolate are ... just what you have so you dont have too much chocolate.

song stuck in your head: 'familiar' from steven universe

last thing you googled: 'surnames posh' <- i'm trying to name baz's ex boyfriends. i gave gerard the surname 'grey', because i thought... he's very similar to baz, that's the point of him, and so this is like 'pitch' ... but then i remembered the other character is called 'snow' and so 'grey' feels really weird. but i can't think of anything i like better, so currently it's still grey. we meet another of baz's boyfriends in chapter 4, and his name is tristan lloyd, which is much better. he too is posh, much to simon's disgust.

time: 22:59

dream trip: hoping to go to mexico later this year, so that's high up there. also, we watch a lot of 'strictly dumpling', and recently mike went to 'les grandes buffets' in the south of france, and it looked amazing - so planning on going there soon. and japan or thailand. i like eating food from these places, basically. that's why i'd want to go there.

last book you read: i finished the first book of 'scum villain's self saving system' today, and then went back to 'chief of staff' by gavin barwell, which is about tory politics during brexit. i sort of hate it, and what it has to say about how much time is wasted on total bullshit, but also it's interesting. slow going though, i dont read much non-fiction. only 20% through it.

last book you enjoyed reading: i really enjoyed 'scum villain' - although i would have enjoyed it EVEN more if i hadn't seen the show, so i knew most of the events. but i'm looking forward to reading the next one, which will be entirely new to me.

i also just finished 'the hourglass throne', which is the third tarot sequence book. really really like these books, great characters, found family, good plot.

last book you hated reading: i didn't hate it, but i can't be bothered to finish holly black's 'book of night', which is a shame as i really want to recapture the 'folk of the air' magic

favourite thing to cook/bake: sometimes i really love cooking and sometimes it's just time i'm spending doing something that i could be spending on something else. i order more takeway than i probably should. i like baking cakes. cakes usually taste bad if you dont make them, but if you do make them then they're almost always good.

favourite craft to do in your free time: i dont really do crafts, i feel the same way as i do about cooking, but more because you can't eat a bad painting. i write fics, if that counts.

most niche dislikes: this is my favourite question and i have no idea how to answer it. the texture of cotton wool? is that a niche dislike? stickers that have started to peel off and have attracted bits of fluff on the back, or aren't completely peeled off like on a book - i hate that.

this week i learned i can't bear the smell of snail rice noodles, but apparently this is a very common thing to dislike.

opinion on circuses, now and in history: totally bizarre question. i really respect mandy having an opinion on it. i really don't. i think i think of circuses as like a thing that i would like to like, but actually a bit like the opera, i wish there was more plot.

do you have a sense of direction, and if not what if the worst way you’ve gotten lost: i have poor sense of direction, thank goodness for google maps. the worst i've ever been lost was when i was about 17 or something and i got lost with three friends around a lake in the middle of the night, in the age when mobile phones were common but did not have GPS. i was so upset and angry about this that it became a meme amongst my friendship group, none of whom were stressed out about it. they made a film for my 20th (? maybe) birthday where they recreated the events, and how we got guided out by a man who looked like morgan freeman or something. it was kind of sweet - even though i literally hated that night.

tagging some other people: @histrange @cows4247 @ivelovedhimthroughworse @bookish-bogwitch @cutestkilla @technetiumai @phoxphyre

#my content

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224politics · 8 years ago

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Grenfell Tower, mobs, and justice

At least 30 people have died in the Grenfell Tower fire. That is the highest number of deaths in a single incident in the UK since the 7/7 attacks (55), a number it seems likely to surpass over the coming days. That would leave only Hillsborough (96), the Aberfan Disaster (144), and the Lockerbie bombing (270) as higher totals in the last half century. The Daily Express has asked if EU regulations resulted in the choice of cladding which encouraged the spread of the fire. The answer is no - the cladding is banned in Germany. A little bit of investigation would have told the Express reporters the idea they were suggesting was untrue.The Daily Mail has printed a story drawing attention to the individual whose fridge apparently started the fire. The premise of the Daily Mail's article overlooks the fact that the fire would have remained small in scale had there not been more systemic issues, and risked turning residents' anger towards an ordinary man who will probably be suffering with extraordinary trauma.The story will have had to pass through a number of editorial and legal staff, there is no way that none of them know how a fusebox works. Yesterday the left-wing political blog Skwawkbox reported a rumour that a D-notice/DSMA had been issued to suppress discussion of the death toll - rumoured to be as high as 200. The site later followed up with a separate article, clarifying that they were satisfied that no such notice had been issued, but drew accusations that the mistake was made in bad faith. The aim of journalism should be to spread truth and understanding, put focus on the important questions. The Express and the Mail actively did the opposite, and failed in their task in a very basic sense. As Skwawkbox was covering an ongoing story, truth is slippier, harder to grab hold of. Perhaps Skwawkbox's reporting was irresponsible, but the Mail's certainly was. And, as a bigger news source with more professional staff and a wider reach, they should be held to higher standards, not lower. Understandably there is currently a lot of anger in the UK, a demand that the causes be identified. There are allegations that "the company that managed Grenfell Tower wanted its fire risk assessments carried out at a "competitive" price by a firm 'willing to challenge excessive safety rules'." It appears that then Housing Minister Gavin Barwell delayed the implementation of a report on housing being vulnerable to fire. The fire-resistant equivalent to the flammable cladding would have cost just £5,000 more for the entire building. It has for a long time been a key part of Tory rhetoric to attack what David Cameron called the "health and safety monster", and is more often referred to as 'red tape'.The Grenfell Action Group - residents trying to pressure their landlord to improve the standard of the building - had previously written that they "firmly believe that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord, the KCTMO, and bring an end to the dangerous living conditions and neglect of health and safety legislation that they inflict upon their tenants and leaseholders". The blogger had been threatened with legal action by the local council for publicising these concerns. Although there's a lot to be angry about, it's vital that anger remains rational and evidence-based.One piece of news which was widely shared on social media was that last year Tory MPs defeated legislation to force landlords to make their property "fit for human habitation".Although outrageous, it appears to have had no practical effect on Grenfell.During the week BBC's Newsnight aired a segment in which a solicitor argued that a public inquiry rather than an inquest will allow the government to gloss over failings. The human rights barrister Adam Wagner - who has served on both inquiries and inquests - argues that it's not as simple as one being good and the other bad, which seems to be the majority legal view in our limited perspective. Following a crush in the crowd at the 1989 FA Cup semi-final held at Hillsborough, the Sun printed a serious of infamous slanders - including that fans robbed the dead - under the heading of 'The Truth'. It took 27 years for it to be officially established that this was nothing more than propaganda by a police force looking to absolve themselves, and that nothing the supporters did contributed to the disaster. In 2014 an investigation into allegations of child abuse by MPs, held by Theresa May's Home Office, went missing, fueling accusations of a cover-up. It's also vital to remember the context of ideological cuts to the state.There is a wider context which has given British people cause to distrust authority. The Tory Party response to Grenfell has been terrible. If reports are correct, Theresa May visited the scene only for twenty minutes on Thursday, and didn't speak to any residents. One of the key aspects of leadership is the requirement to step up, offer reassurance to the vulnerable and desperate that they will be looked after, which is often not the case. Barwell - who last week lost his Parliamentary seat and was appointed to the role of Theresa May's Chief of Staff - has so far not commented on his part in the disaster, and blanked journalists when asked. The speed at which £5m has been pledged to assist victims should be praised, but backing out of her own guarantee to rehouse all residents in the same borough is frustrating. Whatever message the government puts out, it needs to be clear and consistent, to allow the victims as much certainty as possible. Channel 4's Krishnan Guru-Murthy has described a "shocking lack of presence, organisation and authority in N Kensington today [Friday] from local and national Govt."To an extent Tory inaction is understandable given how toxic the issue is for them politically, and it's likely that Barwell's silence is the result of legal advice. But it's vital that victims and working class people currently living in similar circumstances to the victim feel that people in authority are on their side. The accusation that the left and Labour in particular have 'politicised' the tragedy has been made repeatedly. But politics is about understanding and controlling why things happen. There is evidence that Grenfell happened to a large extent because of Tory policy - both the under-regulation of housing and the underfunding of councils, making it harder to enforce existing legislation. While it should be noted that Andrea Leadsom attended Grenfell in May's place, the response from other parties has been better.Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has offered a consoling arm to residents and promised to pursue the issue vigorously. David Lammy, a Labour MP who lost a friend in the fire, has described Grenfell as "corporate manslaughter" - an accusation which appears to be self-evident.The Green Party's Sian Berry, whose 2016 mayoral campaign leaned heavily on a housing platform, has demanded that legislation be changed so that "residents have a final say in all changes to their housing". There has been public anger over the last few days. Kensington and Chelsea Council buildings have been stormed by protestors. Screeches of "murderer" are unfair on May, who has no personal responsibility for the event. But conservative commentators referring to this anger as a mob are also being unfair. For the most part the anger seems relatively restrained, not going past shouting and shoving. The danger of rioting should not be understated - for example the 2011 riots resulted in the deaths of five people.But the likelihood of rioting should not be overstated either, nor should righteous anger be dismissed. Given that dozens of people are dead and thousands more have reason to believe their homes are unsafe, this is remarkably peaceful. Rather than being a wild mob, protestors have shown incredible, superhuman restraint. The 1966 Aberfan Disaster is a useful parallel to Grenfell.Waste from a mining operation was piled high without adequate restraining equipment, on a hillside overlooking a school. The National Coal Board had been repeatedly warned that the practice was unsafe, and there had been two minor slides in Aberfan itself. The coal waste gave way during the school day, crushing the school, killing 28 teachers and 116 students.This kind of extreme negligence seems unbelievable, incomprehensible. But it only seems that way because we have learned from the tragedy, refused to allow it to happen again. To reach that point, public anger is necessary to sustain campaigners through the bureaucracy and inertia that will come. It's also vital to keep our anger focused on the right targets and at the correct causes, but also important that honest missteps be forgiven. Hopefully, half a century from now the actions leading to the Grenfell Fire will be as difficult to comprehend as Aberfan.

#grenfell tower #grenfell fire #Grenfell #Tory #tory party #Theresa May #Gavin Barwell #Jeremy Corbyn

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molly-fitzgerald · 8 years ago

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Here We Go Again - Putting The Pound Before People.

Here We Go Again – Putting The Pound Before People.

Grenfell. The big question on everyone’s mind is how did this happen? Yes, how? That’s a question for another day. The possible answer is awful, and I won’t even go there. The fact is that people lost their lives in terrible circumstances, and that this may have been prevented. My more immediate question is ‘why?’ This fire, (however it started) didn’t need to turn into a complete tragedy.…

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#gavin barwell #grenfell #grenfell fire #ryder

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laura-elizabeth91 · 2 years ago

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Philip May's face was almost as inscrutable as his wife's as he watched Britain's Government suffer the biggest parliamentary defeat in history from the public gallery.

By avoiding eye contact throughout the exchange in the House of Commons, which saw Theresa May's Withdrawal Agreement beaten by an unprecedented 230-vote majority, many assumed the Prime Minister might have broken down had she exchanged glances with the man she calls her "rock".

In fact, as a Downing Street insider later revealed, quite the opposite was true. Inadvertently giving a telling insight into her 38-year marriage, the source said the real reason she couldn't bear to look up at Philip was not because he would spark tears - that's not the way they operate. It was more a case that he'd give her that "look" and she'd start a fit of nervous laughter.

While she shies away from discussing her private life, Mrs May has always been candid in discussing her relationship with the man she met at a Conservative dinner dance when they were at Oxford.

Speaking about the death of her parents, she told BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs that she had "huge support in my husband and that was very important for me". She added: "He was a real rock for me - he has been all the time we've been married, but particularly then, of course, being faced with the loss of both parents within a relatively short space of time."

Yet with reports that the mild-mannered financier has caused a rift at Number 10 by thwarting the idea of winning Labour support for a customs union, just how much power does Philip May actually wield?

Although Downing Street has dismissed as "utter bunkum" claims that Mr May's actions have sparked a row with Gavin Barwell, Mrs May's chief of staff, the rumours do raise intriguing questions about who really wears the trousers in Downing Street.

Of course, this is nothing new. One Cabinet minister once pointed to Samantha Cameron, saying she was the driving force behind many policy decisions. Known for her socially liberal views, ministers joked that Samantha was such a strong influence on her husband David that she "will have a more liberalising impact on Cameron than Nick Clegg". According to Tim Montgomerie, the political columnist, Samantha also had a "huge influence" on the decision to soften the Government's hard-line approach on the Syrian refugee crisis.

And one can't imagine Cherie Blair ever holding back in Tony's self-styled "kitchen cabinet" meetings. Denis Thatcher famously said the role of a political consort should be "always present, never there" and, according to insiders - that's precisely how Philip, 61, plays it.

One former aide described his "ninja like" ability to be ever present without anyone taking "the blindest bit of notice". "Philip wields power, but only when the PM wants him to. He's always there but never in your face. I've never once seen him angry.

"He's cool, he's calm, he's clear - he never waffles. Everything he comes out with is useful and worth listening to. I remember at conference once he was running around making everyone tea. As a consequence, he hears everything that's going on. That way, when everyone has left the room, the PM can turn to him and say: 'Well, what do you think?'"

Although he has worked as a relationship manager for the financial group Capital International for more than a decade, Philip has become an ever more visible presence at Number 10. When his wife took office, his employer issued a statement insisting: "He is not involved with, and doesn't manage, money, and is not a portfolio manager. His job is to ensure the clients are happy with the service and that we understand their goals."

Indeed, workers based near his London Belgravia office had grown used to the sight of the Prime Minister's husband popping into the local Pret a Manger for a sandwich. But not as much since the last general election - a political move, incidentally, that Philip was vehemently opposed to.

According to one impeccably placed source: "In the early days, when Theresa May had Nick and Fi [her former joint chiefs of staff, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill], you hardly saw Philip. He wasn't really needed. But since the snap election he's been on the scene a lot more, especially since Nick and Fi left. He goes on foreign trips now because she doesn't want to do them without him. It's ironic really because he was fiercely opposed to the idea of having another election. He literally said to Theresa: 'We've only just got here, we've only just unpacked the furniture, why are you doing this?'."

Having served as chairman of the local Conservative Party Association in Wimbledon, it was Philip who was tipped to go into politics. He took a step back when Mrs May, 62, was elected as the MP for Maidenhead in 1997, but has remained committed to the Tory cause.

Hence that rumoured Number 10 intervention last week. By reportedly siding with party chairman Brandon Lewis and Chief Whip Julian Smith in encouraging his wife to reach out to the Brexiteers in her own party - rather than the Opposition - the alleged ruckus serves as a reminder that Philip's allegiances lie to the party as much as the woman running the country.

As one source put it: "Philip would have been as capable a politician as Theresa. You could swap them out and he'd be just fine. He's very knowledgeable and committed to the party. He would disappear for a few hours during the election campaign, and when you'd ask him where he'd been he'd say: 'Just out canvassing'."

While it has long been said that Theresa May "doesn't have any friends" inside or outside politics, in fact the couple enjoy what one insider described as a "typically Tory social circle".

"They will meet other couples for dinner. They are quite close to Simon Dudley, the leader of the council in Windsor and Maidenhead, and his wife. It's all very old-school, blue-blooded Tory. You know, the sort of people who buy NZ$950 of raffle tickets and run supper clubs and enjoy cream teas. For them, the Conservative Party is their life. And they wouldn't have it any other way. They love going out and meeting people together."

Theresa also enjoys cooking for her husband - a small semblance of normality in her somewhat surreal world. As one aide revealed: "I remember the PM once delaying an important conference call because she had forgotten to make Philip his lunch. It was really rather touching, seeing how dedicated she is to him, even with everything else on her plate."

Another insider described how the "homely, cosy" decor at the Mays' home in Sonning provided an insight into their private suburban world, where they enjoy gardening, watching quiz shows like The Chase and Eggheads and listening to Test Match Special on BBC Radio 4.

Former grammar schoolboy Philip, who was brought up in Liverpool, also enjoys supporting the Reds - leading to another intriguing anecdote about the couple. Recalling a lunch she had arranged with the Prime Minister and her husband, the hostess went to great lengths to ensure Philip was sitting next to a Liverpool fan, revealing: "I told the guests, if you want the PM to enjoy the lunch, keep Philip happy. If Philip's happy, then the PM's happy - it really is as simple as that."

The Telegraph, London

from 2019

#from the archives

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