Would talks go better if we knew the real Theresa?

While politicians, journalists and current affairs junkies alike will probably be well abreast of the latest in Brexit news, the rest of us, the working class, the madding crowd, might encounter a headline here and a radio bulletin there, writes Joyce Fegan.

More than two-and-a-half years after Britain’s referendum on leaving the European Union, keeping abreast of the subject often feels like researching for a PhD you will never graduate from, nor receive a scroll for.

What with your job, running a house, contemplating switching electricity providers to save a few bob, remembering birthdays, separating your plastics for responsible recycling, the intricacies of the ever-changing Brexit beast might not feature heavy on your list of priorities.

There may be a faint desire to wrap your head around this behemoth of a thing, much like that lifelong promise to read Ulysses. Do you even like James Joyce?

Often the longer something remains on the long finger, the further away it is to becoming a reality. The more headlines you hear on Brexit, the less you understand and the less you want to understand. It makes for awkward smalltalk. It’s only when your colleague or neighbour asks you what you think, that you really wish you’d scrubbed up on your Brexit.

While a ‘Brexit for Beginners’ might have made for a more useful article, you would need to have updated the edition every day, if not every few hours. So instead of trying to understand the problem, it might prove more useful to understand the person.

Trained negotiators, when trying to resolve a cliff-edge crisis, will start off using a few fundamentals.

Say in a hostage situation, where someone has barricaded themselves or others into an impossible situation, negotiators will often work around food and sleep. Knowing that no matter how resolute their subject is, human beings’ will often dwindles when hunger and tiredness arrive. As the saying goes: “We all need to eat.”

It’s time for us to come together, put the national interest first - and deliver on the referendum. pic.twitter.com/PJiVdCWYeT

— Theresa May (@theresa_may) January 17, 2019

Did you know Theresa May has more than 100 cookbooks? What’s more, she’s not into Delia Smith. According to the British prime minister, Delia is “so precise.”

Instead, she prefers “the kind of Jamie, a handful of this and a handful of that, approach.” Good to know.

Brexit’s cheerleader-in-chief likes thing inexact in the kitchen, much like many of us in the madding crowd, who has the time to weigh things out to the nearest gram?

And what of her sleep? Theresa is Thatcherite in her nocturnal needs.

“Fortunately I’m someone who does sleep pretty well, although I don’t get as many hours as I might like,” she said in 2014, in a rare personal interview on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, “you’re probably talking about five or six hours, but there’s a lot of work to do.”

Moving on from the basics, in order to negotiate with Theresa May, are there any other useful pieces of information that one could seize upon?

In May 2014, as home secretary, May gave a speech at a conference. Nothing unusual there. She was speaking at a conference of Britain’s Police Federation. Her speech, when it ended, was famously met with stunned silence from the audience of assembled sergeants, constables and police inspectors.

She had just finished calmly listing incidences of racism, gross misconduct and corruption within the force, dating back decades. In newspaper reports, May’s speech was described as having “obliterated them.” Them, meaning her constables and police officers.

Asked by Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs, what she was thinking as she left the stage, and a stunned-to- silence crowd behind her, May’s self-assured nature shone through.

“Well the reason I had made the speech is because I believed there was an important message to give to the Police Federation,” she said.

May, remaining totally unrattled by the Arctic response to her bombshell speech, instead of being caught in a shame spiral of global disapproval, simply thought “what next,” and not for her, but for the police officers.

When I left the stage, I suppose I was wondering what the next step for them (the officers and constables) was going to be, because they were looking at whether or not they were going to reform, and of course following that speech, that afternoon, they did indeed vote to reform and those reforms are now going through.

May believed she was right. May believed she knew best. May felt the power of her words, and saw them turned into action. It must have been an emboldening political lesson for her.

Nearly five years ago now, she was asked what she would campaign for in a referendum on Britain’s future relationship with the EU.

“There are some specific issues, like free movement, which I think should be part of our renegotiation and a key issue for us,” she answered.

Funny that, her love of free movement is now most impacted at the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The New York Times this week described the border as the “Achilles’ heel of a Brexit deal.”

And does Theresa May have an Achilles’ heel, something which a negotiator might be able to play with?

Looking at her childhood, it is well known that she is the daughter of a vicar. She said “everything revolved around the church.”

However, at 12 years of age, a young Theresa was out “stuffing envelopes” for her local Conservative Association. Her interest in politics, she said, was because she “wanted to make a difference to people’s lives.”

Did her childhood leave her predisposed to that very old notion? The divine-right theory of kingship? Where one’s right to rule, comes not from an earthly authority, but directly from the will of God? Who’s to know.

If, at 12 years of age, she wanted to make a difference to people’s lives, and if at 58 years of age, she delivered a scathing rebuke to her country’s police force, believing that, somehow, she above all knew best, then what kind of a person is Europe trying to negotiate with?

In mediation, there is a golden first rule: that both parties must want to negotiate. If you don’t have that, you won’t make any ground.

Does Theresa May even want to negotiate with us? Or are we dealing with someone who has decided it’s their way or no way.

One last thing; when asked what luxury item she would bring with her to a desert island, without a moment’s hesitation, she asked for a lifetime’s subscription to Vogue magazine.

What that says about Brexit’s cheerleader-in-chief, is anyone’s guess.