May’s big chance

It is the fate of all new prime ministers to be compared with their recent predecessors. Theresa May has already been accused of being the heir to the micro-managing Gordon Brown. Her allies, meanwhile, see a new Margaret Thatcher, an uncompromising Boadicea destined to retrieve sovereignty from Europe. But perhaps a more fitting model for May would be a less recent Labour prime minister: Clement Attlee.

When Labourites reminisce about Attlee, it isn’t so much the man himself who makes them misty-eyed. It is the achievements of those who worked for him — Nye Bevan, Ernest Bevin and the rest. Attlee’s government created the welfare state and the National Health Service, and built a million houses. It had lots of excuses not do any of these things. It was a post-war government, which had, to borrow Liam Byrne’s infamous phrase, ‘no money’.

Theresa May leads a government which also has plenty of good reasons not to achieve much in the way of domestic reform. She could point to her slim majority and say it would be risky to expect too much to get through Parliament. The Conservative whips are behaving as though this were the case. Labour MPs often spend much of their week on a one-line whip, which means they needn’t worry too much about turning up to the Commons. But Conservative ministers are summoned back from overseas trips to stop the government’s fragility becoming too obvious in votes. May could argue that the intricacies of Brexit and the economic consequences of the EU referendum mean there is little opportunity to do much else. Or, as one minister puts it, this isn’t so much 1945 as 1940: the government has one main mission, and to divert attention from it would invite disaster.