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\n Photo by Dan Kitwood\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
\n Photo by Dan Kitwood\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
What is a hero? Rory Stewart, whose latest BBC miniseries The Long History of Heroism has recently concluded, is surely in a position to know \u2013 and he suggests Theresa May.<\/p>\n
Where and in whom one sees heroism is, of course, a personal question, and one which says quite a lot about you. But I confess that even as someone who admires May for the same qualities as Stewart does (\u201can incredible sense of dignity and a real attempt to do what she thought was the right thing\u201d), \u201chero\u201d seems a bit of a stretch. I suspect the fact that she \u201csacrificed her political career\u201d to try and deliver a soft Brexit plays a larger role in Stewart\u2019s calculations than in mine.<\/p>\n
Stewart has his doubts too, of a strange sort: he told the Daily Mail that \u201cit is \u2018really difficult\u2019 to see her as a \u2018classical hero\u2019 because she failed to achieve her main aims\u201d. But does he really believe that success is a condition of heroism? Here, in the land which valorises Dunkirk? The last stand is a classic heroic trope.<\/p>\n
But not any last stand. Crucially, context matters: the commander who dies alongside his men in a doomed but righteous struggle is a hero \u2013 the one who leads his troops needlessly to slaughter is not. The absurdity of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act allowed May to make several last stands. They were ultimately, however, of the latter sort.<\/p>\n
Many people must share the blame for the position the Conservative Party found itself in after the EU referendum. David Cameron had taken the absurd decision to hold a referendum in which the government would campaign for the status quo, then resigned; the two Brexiteers, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, had conspired in their own implosions.<\/p>\n
Had May stepped onto a field containing only the improbable figure of Andrea Leadsom, she might have cast herself as Cincinnatus. But she chose to enter the full leadership contest, in full knowledge that any leader would be defined by the task of getting Britain out of the European Union \u2013 something she had not wanted to do, and for which she had no vision.<\/p>\n
The result was the worst of both worlds: a muddled-together \u201csoft Brexit\u201d which didn\u2019t fulfil the aspirations of the Leavers, compounded by a raft of needless and hugely damaging concessions on Northern Ireland, lathered with tough Home Office-flavoured rhetoric about \u201ccitizens of nowhere\u201d which aggravated Remainers. Stewart says that May \u201cfought tooth and nail\u201d for her palliative vision for Brexit, such as it was. But she did not fight well.<\/p>\n
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