Theresa May’s problem is that she is far too British for her own good

While I was rummaging through data on what Treasury officials had spent on their credit cards, back in George Osborne’s day, I came across a series of curious payments. The Treasury had been paying RADA for coaching sessions. Ministers – I presume it was them rather than civil servants – were being trained by actors. Maybe they should have done the same at the Home Office, because the failure of the then Home Secretary to perform in public could very rapidly turn out to be her undoing.  

Her failure to express empathy during the election campaign was already being dragged up in election post-mortems.  But what has happened since the Grenfell Tower fire on Wednesday has compounded the problem a thousandfold. When she spoke to emergency workers she was criticised for not hugging survivors, like Jeremy Corbyn did. When she visited survivors in hospital and then in a church, she was slammed for not coming out and meeting people on the streets (though the footage of her car being mobbed on the way out demonstrates exactly why perhaps it wasn’t thought safe for her do this).