Voters want to be danced for and May couldn’t, or wouldn’t, dance

The fact is that, although the outward and visible sign was poor communications, the underlying policy reality was the problem, writes Terry Prone.

BECAUSE taxi drivers were scarce when he wrote his plays, Shakespeare, when he needed a character who knew everything and occasionally hit the nail on the noggin, went for Dick the Butcher. Dick maintained that progress towards a coup required pre-emotive action.

“The first thing we do,” he proposed, “let’s kill all the lawyers.” The new version of that, pioneered by Theresa May, is that when you want to survive, after an unprecedented outbreak of self-harm: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the advisers,” starting with Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy, her joint chiefs of staff, who, in fairness, seem to have rendered themselves roughly as popular as bubonic plague with everybody in the Tory government other than the prime minister in an impressively short period of time. This they achieved, according to sources close to the plague, by “rude, abusive and childish” behaviour and by forming a Praetorian Guard around the prime minister. Understandably, the people who couldn’t get past them tended to use descriptions other than “Praetorian Guard”, since those lads, in Ancient Rome, were seen as highly skilled and admirable, and Hill plus Timothy were not so seen.