Opinion | The Unlovable Theresa May

LONDON — My first attempt to charm Theresa May was eight years ago, in the grand surroundings of the State Dining Room in Downing Street, where a couple of hundred women had been invited to a reception for International Women’s Day. Mrs. May, then the home secretary, arrived to the event late and perched by a table looking uncomfortable and alone. She was the only minister not surrounded by a jostling crowd. I told a gaggle of female correspondents that I was going to talk to her. “Don’t bother,” they said. “She’s a blank wall. She never tells you anything.”

I didn’t believe them. In general, politicians need journalists to exchange gossip, spin, insights and facts. I took my glass and introduced myself. Mrs. May gave a small tight smile. Every question I asked, from how she was doing to what challenges she faced at the home office, was batted away with monosyllables. I was baffled. She clearly saw no point in creating a relationship, or explaining any of her thinking to me.

This would have been an irrelevant encounter with an unimportant hack except that practically everybody, from fellow ministers to advisers to European leaders, turns out to have experienced a version of it. Mrs. May’s unique inability to develop or grasp the critical importance of alliances, friendships, coalitions and mutual understanding in politics has destroyed her premiership — and derailed the Brexit process from its beginning to its calamitous stalemate today.

This week, Mrs. May sealed her fate. She announced to her Conservative Party that if they vote for the Brexit deal she negotiated with the European Union — and which Parliament has, humiliatingly, voted down twice already — she will finally resign. Her days are numbered but the damage is done.

When Mrs. May unexpectedly became the Conservative Party’s leader optimists hoped that despite her dullness — or perhaps because of it — she would be a cautious, careful prime minister. As a former Remainer she could have sought common ground between both Leavers and the 48 percent of voters who wanted to stay. It quickly became clear she would do no such thing.

Mrs. May has made dozens of strategic mistakes in the past three years, from calling a general election that destroyed her parliamentary majority to vindictively sacking talented members of her cabinet who had previously opposed her, to allying herself with the most destructive and intransigent Brexiteers in her Conservative Party.

Each of these errors has stemmed from the same fatal flaw: her belief that she can lead and win without paying attention to what her allies, enemies, colleagues — and potential collaborators — want or think. Famously wooden, she seems to regard other crucial players in politics as pieces she can move around a chessboard without motivations of their own.

European Union officials and European leaders have reeled at Mrs. May’s rigidity in Brexit negotiations over the past two years. But this is no surprise to her colleagues. A senior politician who spent years alongside her in the cabinet says that Mrs. May never understood the concept of negotiation. She simply expected the other side to give way. “With most people you go into a room and you say, I need X, you need Y, and the two of you end up with Z. It’s iterative, a compromise. She just doesn’t work like that.”

Nor, the former minister says, does she have the mental agility or intellectual curiosity to handle a complex, shifting political landscape. An effective strategy for Brexit would have required endless brainstorming with key players, from diplomats to advisers. “But you cannot sit in a room with her and have a free-ranging discussion, what about this, what about that. She just can’t do it.” Disastrously, she prefers secretive consultations with her husband Philip and just a couple of trusted colleagues.

Why and how did this shy, private woman, first seek this very public role and then cling so ferociously on to it? Colleagues of hers tell me it is because the Conservative Party is the center of her life. Brought up by her father, a High Anglican vicar, to believe in duty above all, she has transferred that sense of service to the Conservative Party. The party offers higher purpose, codes, rituals and community, just as the church does. She spends many Saturday afternoons canvassing for it. It is why over her disastrous time in office she has so fatally placed its unity above the interests of the country in Brexit.

Mrs. May’s willful ignorance and obstinacy means she has never understood the landscape she’s operating in, where the minefields lie, where the safe places and escape routes might be. She has essentially been blundering her way blindfolded through the most delicate and critical negotiations that Britain has faced since the Second World War, and now she has blown up her political career. She may have blown up the country along the way.

Whether her agreement finally slides past the Commons or not, her leadership is in its dying days. She is on her way out, whether within days, weeks or months. Despite all her duty, she will be remembered as one of the most inadequate and disastrous leaders the country has ever had.

Jenni Russell (@jennirsl) is a columnist for The Times of London and a contributing opinion writer.