Dramas need characters, politics requires politicians and a storm must have an eye. Which is why at the dead centre of Brexit – the biggest and most multifaceted crisis to face this country in more than 60 years – there is just one person. She stands at a Commons dispatch box in an elegant outfit day after day, knowing that the evening will cover her in yet another dung-heap of humiliation that will be daubed all over the next morning’s front pages. All along her frontbench are colleagues just waiting for her to go, so they can take her job and move into her Downing Street home. On her backbenches are MPs who shamelessly boast to journalists their fantasies about putting her in a “noose” and “knifing her in the front”. She is derided, she is hated, she is the target for some of the most outrageous abuse ever to be heaped on a 62-year-old woman from Eastbourne.
In a democracy intent on beating itself up, Theresa May has become the nation’s punchbag. On radio phone-ins, the callers pour bile upon her. On TV sofas, pundits speculate about how many days she has left at No 10. When she isn’t attracting derision, she attracts something arguably worse for a politician: pity. Her voice has gone and, the theory goes, soon she will follow.
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