I wish Theresa May hadn’t written this book. I was just getting to like her caustic takedowns of successive Tory prime ministers, but now the old Theresa comes back to haunt us. There’s no doubting that she is dutiful. As a vicar’s daughter and an only child, she writes that even at a young age she felt it was “incumbent on me to consider carefully how my words and actions reflected not just on me, but on others”. That’s quite a burden to bear, and it gives a piquancy to her attacks on Boris Johnson and others who believe the rules don’t apply to them. The implication is that she would have made a better prime minister than Johnson during Covid. (Not a high bar, but anyway.)
It’s also clear that she cares about stuff. She details some of the most egregious issues she has had to deal with and writes movingly about Hillsborough, Grenfell and the Primodos hormone-based pregnancy test scandal. She is deadly serious about modern slavery, people trafficking and child sexual abuse. She is convincingly cross about the police failure to investigate the horrific murder of Daniel Morgan (less so about the Windrush scandal, over which she exonerates herself).
