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).
But there are big problems here, too. First, her version of the events of her premiership bears scant resemblance to what I, as an MP, witnessed. There is a brief mea culpa for the snap 2017 election, which she thought would deliver her a compliant Tory-filled Commons but instead deprived her of a majority. Yet nowhere does she accept that her stubborn dutifulness became a terrible stumbling block. She says she wanted to deliver a Brexit that would satisfy both the 48% who voted remain and the 52% who voted leave, but her January 2017 Lancaster House speech closed the door to that. She didn’t have the personality to reach out boldly across the political divide. She navigated choppy waters very poorly. She snippily blames everyone else for the disastrous version of Brexit we ended up with – Johnson, Bercow, Barnier, Corbyn, even Starmer. But she laid its foundations.
There are moments when her exasperation becomes unbearable. She bleats that ministers had to be dragged back from a white-tie dinner because the opposition had resorted to an “esoteric” procedure. When she claims that Bercow “overrode the longstanding convention that the government determine the business of the house”, I wanted to shout: “But you didn’t have a majority!” She is irritated that Labour used “humble addresses” to force the government to publish papers – and apparently forgets that she was the first prime minister in history to be found in contempt of parliament for refusing to publish the full legal opinion on her Brexit deal, as the house demanded. She writes as if she very nearly got her deal over the line, yet the Commons voted it down by 432 to 202 in January 2019 in the worst government defeat on record.
The biggest problem, however, is the book’s title. She accuses Russia (over Ukraine) and the US (over leaving Afghanistan) of “abuse of power” – which is a gross understatement in the former case and a bizarre accusation in the latter. Here, too, her memory fails her. She claims she was always “one of the hawks” on Russia, and now denounces the west’s response to Putin’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 as “sadly lacking to say the least”. But as home secretary she repeatedly turned down requests for an official inquiry into the murder of Alexander Litvinenko until 2014 on the grounds that it might upset UK-Russia relations.
May defines “abuse of power” as acting to protect one’s own position. The words “mote” and “plank” spring to mind. After all, was it not an abuse of power to try to trigger article 50 to commence the two-year Brexit negotiations without a vote in parliament?
Worst of all, she rightly denounces some of the appalling behaviour of MPs who have bullied or sexually harassed staff in recent years and she takes credit – with Andrea Leadsom – for setting up the independent complaints and grievance scheme to tackle this problem in parliament. Yet she ungenerously forgets the role played by opposition MPs, including Jess Phillips, Stella Creasy and Caroline Lucas. And she entirely omits her shameful decision to give the whip back to two MPs with serious outstanding complaints against them, Andrew Griffiths and Charlie Elphicke (Griffiths was subsequently cleared of wrongdoing in that case but Elphicke was convicted of sexual assault charges), supposedly to bolster her numbers in the 1922 Committee vote of no confidence in her in December 2018. Was that not an abuse of power, too?
So, buy it and read it, if only to remember that we’ve now had five duff Tory PMs in a row.
• Chris Bryant is the Labour MP for Rhondda and author of Code of Conduct: Why We Need to Fix Parliament – and How to Do It (Bloomsbury). The Abuse of Power: Confronting Injustice in Public Life by Theresa May is published by Headline (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
