Why is Theresa May's premiership in such turmoil?

[Blair]

To give my convoluted thoughts...

She got the job because she was the least offensive, and least disliked candidate who survived until the 2016 leadership election; she was effectively crowned by the party because those on the left wanted to stop Boris Johnson or Andrea Leadsom winning, and she was supported by the right because she was a relatively right wing Home Secretary who clashed with the 'modernisers'.

I hope I posted before the election about her flaws; as it's the one prediction I've gotten correct. And that is that she's basically Gordon Brown MK.2 as PM minus the political strategy or skills. She very slowly climbed up the party, got the job as Home Secretary four days before the election as the former got sacked for being homophobic, and then basically didn't cock up as Home Secretary. She wasn't a particularly masterful minister; but she knew her brief, knew how to shift the blame, and avoided drama.

This lead her to 2016, where she took no real strong stance in the referendum beyond one speech supporting Remain; which allowed her to watch whilst Osborne, Gove, Crabb, Johnson etc blew themselves up in the aftermath.


It's no surprise that her campaign was a disaster; namely because she never had a national campaign before. Corbyn had two leadership elections, Cameron had 5 years as opposition leader, Blair had 8 years in various roles etc. It would be like Tom Perez running for President in 2016 and completely falling apart.

Things like putting fox hunting in her manifesto, not attending TV debates, not knowing how to really talk to the media or voters, supporting the hardest of brexiters, not raising the public pay cap for teachers, nurses etc/ It was also an election where living standards were falling, and after 7 years of austerity people wanted something more.

At the very worse I thought she'd get a 30-40 seat majority; which would have been seen as a failure but the hung parliament was one of the biggest failings since 1945.


Now since then Tory MPs have worked out that she's not a good campaigner, is pretty unpopular and also have remembered they don't like a lot of her policies; she's to the left of Cameron on some parts of the Economy but to the right on immigration; which puts her against about 50-80 of her own MPs.

She's had a fair few cock ups; hugging close to Trump, not meeting the victims of Grenfell, making the deal with the DUP, and now delivering a disaster of a speech when she needed a great performance.

TL;DR: She's a crap campaigner, who cocked up an election, and has no base in the party beyond being a vessel for Brexit.