Part of the point of being prime minister is the scope it gives the incumbent to get things done. With a bee in their bonnet, or a newsflash ringing in their ears, they can emerge from their office and demand to know what the hell is being done. Officials can be summoned, pulses quickened, and action taken.
That our prime minister does not do this, because she is temperamentally incapable, with close to zero capacity for initiative, helps explain why this is one of the most spineless, depressed, and depressing administrations in living memory.
The inertia and dysfunction is even worse than it looks from the outside. Although individual ministers are privately appalled, they press on regardless of their boss. It’s like an orchestra in which the players do what they want while the conductor sits on her hands.
What’s most shameful about this state of affairs is that the cabinet knows Theresa May cannot do it, but chooses for a variety of reasons (fear of change, fear of being fired by a successor) to avoid confronting the truth. It amounts to a collective fraud perpetrated on the country.
May’s unsuitability for leadership was partly obscured by her aggressive chiefs of staff before they quit in the wake of last year’s election result, and until recently by Damian Green in his role as her de facto deputy.
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One former No 10 aide says: “She is passive. She takes whatever passes in front of her, finds out what is proposed, usually agrees with the official, and approves.”
Another says: “You long for Theresa to demand something, or to show any passion or drive or interest. But there is nothing there. The civil service like her. She is an administrator sitting in her office when the country needs a leader with a vision.”
Rightly, there are many restrictions on prime ministers, even those with the kind of Commons majority that May lacks. But those in charge should exhibit some signs of a political heartbeat and elementary curiosity. Indeed, with engaged people at the helm, far bigger moments in this country’s history than Brexit have been successfully navigated.
Britain was going down the pan in the late 1970s, but in Jim Callaghan and Denis Healey there were at least two sharp individuals who recognised that the levers of power existed, even if they could not always pull them. In the financial crisis that he left the country ill-prepared for, Gordon Brown was at least fully engaged in the pursuit of a solution.
The most famous example of the impact of executive action, of course, is Winston Churchill, lionised in the new film Darkest Hour. Churchill liked to scribble ATD or Action This Day! on memos. He was far from infallible but knew how to lead and how to apply an energising jolt of electricity to the system.
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Today, the upper echelons of the Tory party are flatlining. Only Boris Johnson, behaving badly, and airing justified complaints in public about the need to fix the NHS, or Michael Gove at the environment department, are trying to jolt their colleagues into life.
For the Tory party, this stasis is a potential electoral disaster. If the government fell, say through a split on Brexit, and the Tories had not taken the opportunity to change leader, they risk being stuck with May during the horrors of a snap election campaign in which they would be asking the voters to back her for another five years.
Faced with that awful prospect, someone surely must be willing to have a crack at the leadership problem before it’s too late?
Some brave souls, such as the Tory MP Nick Boles, are speaking out about the government’s drift on the NHS. Nicholas Soames MP, grandson of Churchill and unlikely Twitter rebel, perhaps inspired by watching Darkest Hour, is demanding dynamism.
One of the main lessons of May 1940 is that, in a pickle, there is often no ideal solution. Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister, had been outwitted by Hitler and was wholly unsuited to prosecute the war. Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary and favourite among many Tories to succeed Chamberlain, was for compromise with Germany. Churchill was discredited and a risk. Tory MPs who rebelled against Chamberlain did so without knowing who they would get or how it would work out. But they moved anyway.
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This is not an appeal for Boris, much as he likes to see himself as Churchill Mk II. But it is ridiculous to say that no one in the cabinet could operate a government more effectively than May. Michael Gove, Amber Rudd, David Davis or Jeremy Hunt could. Equally, in a quick contest someone else could emerge. They, and we, will not know unless the dice are rolled.
The timing is, of course, sub-optimal, but May 1940 was hardly ideal either. In a few weeks’ time Brussels will ask what exactly the British want in phase two of Brexit. So far there are no clues.
Equally pressing, and a bigger threat, is the national requirement to counter the rise of the far left under Jeremy Corbyn. There need not be an election if May goes, as the government (just) has the numbers, but there is a pressing need to tackle the housing crisis with more than the glib announcements made in the last budget and to set about meaningful reform of the health service. None of this is happening to any convincing degree under May.
In the face of this farce, lots of Tory MPs agree she cannot go on. What we need is Action This Day.