Theresa May needs to find a voice equal to the times

You do not become a high court judge by quaking before a profession as menial as mine. The bench requires, and confers, a certain immunity to intimidation. Nobody should pretend that British rule of law came under serious threat during last week’s populist growl at that old tautology: unelected judges.

Unless the supreme court overrules the high court next month, the government cannot press the formal trigger for exit from the EU without a parliamentary vote. The shrill can throw more decibels at the judges but those over-ear wigs muffle any racket.

To less robust personalities than theirs, however, it felt like a hairy episode in the civic life of the nation. Among the near-half of voters on the wrong side of the referendum, there are worries about the lot of a dissenter in an unrecognisably het-up country.

Raw feelings

A natural prime minister would have sensed the raw feelings out there and found some way to soothe them. What emerged was a narrow defence of the courts – late, terse and authored by the lord chancellor. Theresa May did not manage even that much in the 1,000 words she wrote for the Sunday Telegraph, which read like a pitch for Eurosceptic votes in a Conservative party leadership contest by someone who has not been told she won four months ago.

Only later, India-bound and pressed for comment, did she say something nice about judicial independence. Still no sense of a larger magnanimity, still no example set for the little demagogues on her own backbenches.

As clues to her style of command, these are only scraps but there are others. A month has passed since she described “citizens of the world” as “citizens of nowhere” in a line that bundled a legal nonsense, a philosophic banality and an unprovoked jibe at millions of decent people into one badly advised stab at abstract reasoning. Transient hedgies and bankers are used to character assassinations but think of a student studying abroad, or the child of a British mother and foreign father.

Take the lack of grace towards David Cameron, her predecessor, into the reckoning, and the overall impression is of someone who has never really stopped being home secretary. May can work to a brief and hold a line against pressure. She has the stamina to bend the impersonal machinery of state to her will. She is, as coaches say of a certain kind of unsung footballer, a good professional.

What a shame – for her, for us – that the job of national leadership requires a bit more. In a country where the monarch cannot make a political intervention, the prime minister is often the effective head of state. She must gauge the emotional condition of the people, reflecting it back in happy times, taking the heat out of it in fiery ones. It takes steel and silk. It takes, in the non-feudal sense of the word, class.

Ravaged egos

Painful national projects require it. There was nothing inevitable about the British reconciling themselves to the loss of African colonies in the 1960s. There were proud imperialists, ravaged egos, howls of betrayal, raw memories of violent exchanges with Kenyan rebels, the nearby example of French intransigence.

A smaller prime minister than Harold Macmillan, less tempered by war and less sensitive to the power of words, might have misjudged the eclipse of empire by showing too much resentment, or too little. Instead he found an elegiac register – the "wind of change", an impersonal, unstoppable thing – that allowed reactionaries to give up with dignity.

Cameron had his own statesmanlike moment in 2010, deftly apologising on behalf of the British state after an inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland 38 years earlier. He was four weeks into the job. May has had four months to find a voice equal to the times.

If Britain's extrication from the EU is to avoid fulfilling the ugly promise of recent weeks, with voter pitted against MP, MP against judge, judge against editor, editor against corporate boss, then, as Lord Patten, the crossbench peer, said on Sunday, "it is for Theresa May to give that sort of leadership".

This does not imply a soft exit, just sensitivity to a very large number of very anxious citizens. It means allowing a parliamentary vote that she will win anyway. It means standing up to Eurosceptics who, in their pungent blend of triumphalism and insecurity, have threatened to foul the civic space of late. It means being more than a tenacious spokesperson for 52 per cent of the country. It means minding her tone. Macmillan took Britain out of Africa with some briskness even as he talked a gentle, tentative game.

– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016