Theresa May presides over one of the leakiest governments in British history, with claims from ministers often undermined by a leak saying the exact opposite. Ben Worthy reads the runes of May’s approach to secrecy and attempts to find a common pattern from her Home Office years and into her premiership.
Most prime ministers have an awkward relationship with the truth. The murky worlds of intelligence, spin, and politics often meet for them in uncomfortable ways. Some became renowned or infamous for their ability to manipulate reality and facts: think of Tony Blair having to reassure us that he was a ‘pretty straight kind of guy’. Machiavelli captured the difficulty for leaders when he cautioned that those with power must ‘live by integrity and not by deceit’, should surround themselves with advisors who would tell them the truth but should be a ‘dissembler’ when necessary.
Theresa May was supposed to be different. She was the plain speaking Vicar’s daughter who would tell the uncomfortable, unspun truth. She would bring the values of the vicarage to Downing Street. For some, the lingering image of May as the honest clergyman’s daughter lasted even up to the 2017 manifesto when, with a ‘clear ethical – even Christian – tone, this vicar’s daughter took the riskier option: to be unremittingly honest with the public about the great challenges this country faces, to spell out how she intends to confront them and to promise only what she can deliver.’
Almost two years on it seems May, like Trump, is both secretive, but also strangely transparent. Her blend of secrecy, closed decision-making and blame avoidance was honed in the Home Office, and came with her to Downing Street. Her ‘submarine’ strategy of set-piece interventions served her through crisis after crisis in the Home Office. Yet it has proved her undoing as Prime Minister. Her secrecy led her to try (and fail) to carry out Brexit ‘without a running commentary’ and without Parliament. It also meant she consulted too few on her snap election and her manifesto.
May’s secrecy is of an oddly transparent kind, easily caught out and exposed. One commentator observed that May had behaved with Brexit as if no-one else in Europe had the internet. Similarly, in domestic politics she recklessly gives poor answers or excuses as if no-one has access to Hansard or YouTube. Despite her liking for information control, she also presides over one of the leakiest administrations in history. A stream of unauthorised disclosures flow, continually, from her divided and disloyal Cabinet and unhappy officials. Leaks go from the sublime – such as DExEU’s own analysis that every Brexit scenario would leave Britain worse off – to the ridiculous – such as Hammond’s view of female train drivers. The rabbit hole of leaks and failed attempts is summed up by the headline ‘Leak inquiry into leaking of letter warning about leaks’. Time and time again, May’s ‘secretively open’ approach leads to a self-reinforcing pattern of attempted secrecy, exposure, poor justification and worsening crisis.
The Windrush scandal is a case in point. As it unfolded, May’s initial claim was that it was a Data Protection issue (it wasn’t) or that it was Labour that did it (they didn’t). Each claim from Amber Rudd was artfully undermined by a leak saying the exact opposite: there were no targets (yes there were, said a leak) and she was not aware of them (yes she was, according to this letter from Rudd to May). At this point, May’s former (ish) advisor Nick Timothy, with his familiar brand of Powell-esque politics and Kamikaze-esque strategy, decided to defend May’s record. He claimed she was against the famous ‘Go Home’ illegal immigrant vans but that they were implemented ‘while she was on holiday’. Even Blair, through five Iraq war inquiries, didn’t dare try that as an excuse. In fact, another judicious leak showed that May was only against the vans because the language wasn’t tough enough. All these smokescreens of failed excuses hid the truth that the Windrush deportations came directly from May’s own dog whistle rhetoric and bid to create a hostile environment.
May and her government seem unable to comprehend what’s known as the Streisand effect, namely that trying to hide something often draws attention to it. David Davis is a past master. He began his time as minister in 2016 promising not to be ‘Rasputin-like’ in holding back, and admitted that Brexit would be ‘as complex as the Schleswig Holstein affair’ (exactly) and as difficult ‘as the moon landing’. But in 2017, Streisand struck when he bragged of ‘50, nearly 60 sector analyses already done [with] planning work going on 22 other issues which are critical, 127 all told’. This led to a long battle to get hold of them, involving freedom of information requests and obscure parliamentary procedures, which led to Davis, explaining six months later, that ‘already done’ actually meant ‘don’t exist’.
What makes the secrets fall apart so rapidly is that the reasoning or excuses are so poor, easily disprovable or outright odd. In case you had forgotten, May called the General Election in 2017 because, in her own words, the EU, Liberal-Democrats in the Commons (all eight of them) and the House of Lords were trying to swing the election for Corbyn:
Threats against Britain have been issued by European politicians and officials. All of these acts have been deliberately timed to affect the result of the general election… there are some in Brussels who do not want these talks to succeed, who do not want Britain to prosper.
She added, in another version of the statement, that ‘Britain simply will not get the right Brexit deal if we have the drift and division of a hung parliament’. May now has said hung parliament and the House of Lords, according to various irate Brexiters, doing its level best to stop her Brexit.
Any politician must navigate the tricky grey area between what Chekov called the conventional truth and conventional lies. The problem for May is that her failed attempts take her far into Trumpian territory. Time and time again, her attempts at secrecy reveal the truth and demonstrate a worrying amount of dissonance and denial. Over everything from Windrush to the Irish border, she resembles a leader constantly attempting to persuade the public that 2+2 =5. After a year and a half of May’s attempted secrecy, the revealed truth is that the UK government has no plan and no strategy.
May’s instinctive and poorly-handled secrecy is one part of a movement away from how she claimed her premiership would be. Her premiership has resembled nothing more than an embattled retreat, a rearguard action as she backed away from promises, positions and, seemingly in some senses, from power itself.
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Ben Worthy is Lecturer in Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London.
All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Featured image credit: DonkeyHotey (CC BY 2.0).
In politics it’s called ‘leaking’ and is to be condemned. In private industry it’s called ‘whistle blowing’ and is to be applauded. It’s about time we had a Leakers’ Charter. Politicians aside, few would argue recent leaks have done more harm than good.
Most of the time politicians are in the business of trying to make difficult choices. They know that if they fail to persuade the voter they may be out of a job or out of power and any good intentions they have for the welfare of the country are gone.
The necessary interface between the voting public and the politician is the media, which should be an honest and undistorting connection. Unfortunately, it isn’t and the reason for that is that it has long been realised that being able to criticise government is a vital ingredient of the sort of society that we want. So we allow freedom to the media which they abuse on a daily basis.
The good intentions break down because the regular columnist in a national newspaper or a regular presenter on Newsnight or an artful organiser using social media can have a disproportionately persuasive effect on the electorate. By presenting news in a certain way, by using the word ‘claimed’ rather than ‘said’ by omitting certain parts of the news, by hostile interviewing such that the intentions of the public figure are obscured, by such means opinion is manipulated. And so immense power is available to a few.
As a lecturer in politics I am sure you will be well aware of all this. I don’t disagree with your article, except for the rather underhand attack on Tony Blair, but it should include a more explanatory reference to the game being played out.
It’s often been said that Article 50 was triggered too early, before the UK had got a good plan in place as to how the route to Brexit would proceed.
Could it be that the timing of the triggering was largely determined by how it would give the Conservatives a big majority in the June 2017 election? Its effect on the Brexit process, apart from making it more likely to happen, was a minor consideration in its timing. Indeed, Brexit was notable for its absence as a issue in the subsequent election campaign.
Although we were told that the decision to hold the general election was made in April 2017 we may have been misled about the true timing of events.
How about this timeline?
Shortly after the Referendum in June 2016 the Conservatives only led Labour by around 3% in the polls, despite Labour having chosen the “unelectable” Corbyn nine months earlier. When Theresa May became Conservative leader in July 2016, the lead over Labour began to grow and by December 2016 it was around the 13% mark.
The Conservatives then began to think that a general election in the nice weather of June 2017 would give them, for the first time in 30 years, the 100+ majority that they last had in the days of Margaret Thatcher.
With the lead over Labour still increasing, preparations began in the New Year. The election is timed to happen 20 months after Corbyn’s accession so any accusation that the Conservatives are taking an opportunistic advantage of Labour’s weak leader can be batted aside.
Friendly newspapers were informed of the decision so that they could begin storing anti-Corbyn articles.
Triggering Article 50 was then carefully timed to be in March 2017 for two reasons.
Firstly: the UK would leave the EU before the European Parliament elections of May 2019 which meant there would be no need to hold these elections. Elections mean campaigns, and campaigns might raise questions about why the UK is leaving the EU. They might focus the mind of the electorate away from the impression that the UK’s large anti-EU press wants to create.
Secondly, triggering Article 50 meant that UKIP voters now had concrete evidence that the Conservatives were committed to leaving the EU. This meant that the large number of Conservative voters who had drifted off to UKIP could now drift back, safe in the knowledge that the first step to leaving the EU has been taken.
The next step was to call the general election, despite Theresa May telling us many times over the previous nine months that she has no intention of calling one. The decision to call it was, we were told, made solely by May on a walking holiday in Wales in April 2017….
First indications were good. The announcement of the decision caused the Conservatives to jump about 3% in the polls and UKIP support to fall by the same number. With an opinion poll lead over Labour of about 25% it seems hard to believe that the entire Conservative Party couldn’t wait for the election to happen and deliver a massive majority in June. And yet after the election the impression arose that Theresa May had somehow forced the election onto an unwilling Party.
The local elections in May 2017 resulted in a thumping Conservative victory—but then younger voters, who are more likely to vote Labour, rarely bother to turn out for local elections.
It went slightly downhill for the Conservatives from then on.