May’s opponents are the mad and the bad

I first met Theresa May, or met her properly, way back in the last century. I’d been invited to speak at a constituency dinner for Maidenhead Conservatives on a Saturday night, and sat at her table. She was with her husband, Philip; I remember only my suspicion that he didn’t desperately want to be there. Of her I remember the pallor, and a certain shyness; but the couple were pleasant and welcoming to me, and as I’m not one to pump people for political news and gossip, and she isn’t one to volunteer such things, this was not the sort of evening that would have prompted an entry in the diary I don’t anyway keep. I suspect hundreds who’ve dined with Mrs May, asked to recall the occasion, would struggle — as I do here — to say much more.

The second occasion was very different, and a couple of years ago. This time my partner and I were the hosts, and our MP in the Derbyshire Dales, Patrick McLoughlin, and his wife Lynn had brought the Mays to supper with us after she’d spent the day pressing the flesh in the East Midlands. It was Theresa and Philip’s wedding anniversary, poor things, and this cannot have been the ideal way to spend their time.

But she was fun. She arrived with a bottle of gin. I teased her about the wedding anniversary and said that we’d hired a male police constable strippergram for after dinner but Patrick had reminded me of her spat with the Police Federation so I’d cancelled. She had the grace to laugh. As the evening went on everyone relaxed and we talked about anything but politics, which I noticed she avoided; and by just before midnight, when the Mays left, I’d concluded she was nothing like the ‘ice maiden’ or robotic figure the newspapers claimed.