The Abuse of Power? Theresa May’s new book is an abuse of reality!

The former PM’s life story is a page-turner for all the wrong reasons, writes Tom Peck. While we learn she was brought up to say nothing entertaining, funny or even remotely interesting, she nevertheless reveals herself to be rather thrillingly delusional

The England cricket team meet Prime Minister Theresa May after winning the Cricket World Cup in 2019 (Getty Images)

Theresa May is one of few former prime ministers not to have written an autobiography. Her reasons for not doing so she makes very clear, possibly by accident, in the book she has now written, The Abuse of Power: Confronting Injustice in Public Life.

In the book, she explains how growing up the daughter of a vicar made her think she was, in a way, always an MP; always representing an institution other than herself, and that was why she grew up determined never to do or say anything which anyone else might find in any way entertaining or even faintly interesting.

Neurologists understand the human memory to work in a specific way. When a memory is recalled, it does not recall the original memory, but rather the most recent time you remembered it. It consistently lays adult life over childhood memories. Which might explain why Theresa May really does appear to remember of her own childhood: “There were times when I stopped myself from making a funny aside or what I thought was a humorous quip because it could have been taken out of context.”

But The Abuse of Power is, in its way, a bold new type of autobiography. In the sense that it is a book about her, but framed through being about all of the people who wronged her, mainly through having the temerity to not do exactly what she wanted them to do.

Being a vicar’s daughter may have held her in “good stead” for a career in politics, but it does not appear to have bestowed upon her any great moral responsibility to tell the truth. This is not to say that she is a liar. That would be a bold and unkind claim.

The extracts from her forthcoming memoir do not appear to be the work of a calculated fantasist, but someone who is merely entirely delusional.

The abuses of power to be found in The Abuse of Power are in no small part abuses that other people might argue are in fact entirely legitimate attempts to prevent her doing precisely what she wanted, and more precisely, because she didn’t have the power to do so.

Various Conservatives abused their power by not accepting her Brexit deal, it turns out. John Bercow abused his power as the speaker of the House of Commons (this one, to be fair, stands up to the most scrutiny). But ultimately, her failure was because the Labour Party wouldn’t support her. Or, in her own words, “The Labour Party chose to abuse their power.”

Naturally, most of us have buried all memory of those years deep in the hurt locker and have done our best to throw away the key. But I fear I cannot be alone in having at least PTSD flashbacks to a general election in the year of 2017. To the prime minister at the time, whatever her name was, begging the voters over and over again to “strengthen my hand in the negotiations with Europe” and the voters then absolutely declining to do so.

Theresa May quite rightly calculated that she did not have enough power to pass a deal through the House of Commons, so she called a general election and converted her slim majority into no majority at all. It is hard to imagine a more potent abuse of power, than to seek more power, accidentally lose what you already had, then expect those who gained the power you lost – because the voters gave it to them – to carry on as if nothing had happened.

At least on the evidence of the words she has chosen to write in her own book, which may very well be different from the voices that come to her in the night, it doesn’t appear to have occurred to her that losing your majority also involves losing your power. If it didn’t, the people would have none at all.

“When push came to shove,” she says, “I was willing to compromise in order to deliver Brexit. Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party were not.”

Given that in the run up to the referendum, the likes of Nigel Farage and Aaron Banks had spoken longingly of the Norway model, which meant – whether they knew it or not – staying in the single market and accepting free movement of people, and yet the form of Brexit she ultimately pursued was more extreme than anyone dared whisper at any point before 23 June 2016, it is not immediately clear who it is Theresa May was willing to compromise with. Having campaigned for and voted for Remain, the one person she certainly refused to compromise with at any point was herself.

It’s not clear quite what she expected Labour to compromise with, but she does conclude that she was vindicated in the end, when they “paid the price at the ballot box”. It would, arguably, be unkind to point out that the price was so heavy because someone took away their free gift – her.

There will be a change of government soon. It is a certain fact that the country’s best hope for a more prosperous future will be via a party that is able to create the conditions to change the political weather on EU membership.

It won’t be easy, but it would be a whole lot harder if Starmer and others were haunted by a long public record of going along with Theresa May’s crazy ideas, just to keep Theresa May happy. What they did was not an abuse of power. To think so is an abuse of reality.