It was no “Yo, Blair!” As ministers at the European Council summit exchanged kisses and revived private jokes, a socially sandbanked Theresa May stood alone, adjusted her cuffs, shuffled papers and doggedly smiled. “Brexit in a photo”, “Britty no mates”, came the mocking tweets.
But, however toe-curling, this image will not steal a scintilla of Mrs May’s appeal. Here were EU leaders who summer together, know each other’s families, exchange chatty texts, call each other friends. Mrs May’s perceived character flaws, her unclubbability, the self-contained seriousness and distaste for gossip that infuriates lobby hacks are, in the current climate, her greatest strengths. Among the schmoozing euro-Cavaliers stood our puritan PM.
This summer’s Roundhead revolution was so swift and brutal we have almost forgotten the ancien regime. But at a Christmas party for the old Cameron crowd, I surveyed the naughty people, ministers routed by May regardless of record, who like boozy lunches, smutty jokes, whose university days produced rumours of sexual indiscretions and substance-related high jinks. Rich, louche, posh, loud, liberal-minded, well-connected and great fun, they carouse in backbench exile.
Before her Brexit plan is published and we have anything firm to judge her upon, Mrs May’s popularity is predicated upon her character. And it could not be more perfect for an electorate disgusted with chillax chumocracies, entitlement and swank.
Discussing her Christmases past and present in Radio Times, Mrs May recalls sitting beside her mother at the organ during her vicar father’s sermons, rarely opening her presents before evening. Even now her routine is church, a charity lunch for the old and lonely, before serving a goose she cooks herself. Gratification is always meagre and long-deferred.
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With Theresa May, that old voter question “can you imagine having a beer with this candidate?” is inverted. Unlike Cameron or Obama or Blair she has the air of being a dry fun-suck — but we like her all the better for that. These days, dull is good, plain beats fancy. Boris Johnson, captain of Cavaliers who defected to the other side, can no longer bluster through tricky situations with jokes and Latin quotes. He sounds childish, not playful, in such serious times.
The PM’s dullness is reassuring. Her liking for wholesome alpine walking tours in the Bernese Oberland is preferable to the Camerons’ pantomime of being an average family on uneasyJet flights to modest photo-op hotels. Mrs May’s only frivolity is a taste for expensive clothes. But on Desert Island Discs when she asked for Vogue magazine as her luxury I wondered if she truly loves fashion or uses leopard-print heels to appear more intriguing than she knows herself to be.
Jeremy Corbyn too was elected on a puritan surge, a disavowal not just of Blair’s Iraq but New Labour’s swagger. A socialist sadhu; a vegetarian, non-drinking, allotment-holder who promised a return to old socialist pieties, carried his sandwiches in a brown paper bag, who’d never tanned himself on an oligarch’s yacht but whose idea of extravagance is a bicycle tour of Swanage or buying his wife an “up-cycled” cardie.
“Our clean-living conformist youth is staying indoors glued to screens: half of London’s nightclubs have closed since 2005
Initially even Labour moderates liked Corbyn’s austere, thrifty, quiet-spoken unworldliness, his “new way of doing politics”, the Amish-like simplicity of his delivery. Until he revealed himself as hollow and incompetent and allied to witchfinders. Now the Labour Party has announced Corbyn will be relaunched as “left populist”, be on TV more — not cowering from journalists who dare ask him questions — brasher, one assumes, more vivid. How will this square with his original ascetic appeal?
Corbyn is popular with the young because they too are new puritans. An NHS report this week showed that experimentation with alcohol among eight to 15-year-olds is down by two thirds since 2003 and children trying cigarettes has fallen by three quarters. This has been attributed to tougher age controls on buying booze. But fake IDs are easy to come by and everyone knows the dodgy local off-licence that sells vodka to kids, no questions asked.
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Alcohol consumption, use of recreational drugs and crime among young people have been falling for years, along with underage sex and teen pregnancies. Our clean-living conformist youth is staying indoors glued to screens: half of London’s nightclubs have closed since 2005. Their only vice left — as with the rest of society — is overeating. Plus a puritan self-righteousness.
Once unruly youth tribes like punks and mods or 1990s ravers, they have been fractured into identity politics and the vanity of ever-tinier differences. And a strict new protocol has swept universities, where raucous arguments, drunken encounters and antisocial behaviour are “problematic”, not fun times. Instead of sex, they sext: instead of getting high, they enjoy the adrenaline surge of a Facebook row, a Twitter spat. Instead of a Bullingdon set of rich young men ripping up restaurants, Oxford debates gender, holds classes in sexual consent and produces movements like Rhodes Must Fall.
But what was so great anyway about hanging around bus shelters drinking cider in the hope of a snog, clubbing together for ten revolting Players No 6, doing a bit of petty vandalism to pass the time, hoping — always hoping — something would happen? Our music was better and girls weren’t pressured to look perfect 24/7, but that’s about all.
It is the future of puritan youth one doesn’t envy: heads down, grade-grubbing for exams that get them on courses that guarantee debts but not a job or a home of their own. While the PM pushes on alone, embodying our austere and literal-minded age, but lacking the power to change it.