I see you outside number 10, your voice cracking, the grim facade you’ve so carefully honed over the years rusting and flaking away as human emotion finally starts to override your core programming. It’s been over two decades of public disservice, three at the very top finally bringing you down. There will be no nonchalant whistles as you walk away – the reality is just too stark, even for a woman so intransigent and stoic that she shrugged off blades in her back that would have felled anyone else. The Maybot has finally broken down, the gears screeching against each other as it weeps at the pedestal of its own failure. It’s uncomfortable watching you cry, as it is when anyone inflicts an embarrassing wound upon themselves. Let us not forget, then – it’s you that tossed the Lego bricks around the room and it’s you that decided to stomp about barefoot. We’ll wince with you because we aren’t sociopaths but that 10 Downing Street has become a hostile environment to you is an irony lost on none of us.
It’s an ignominious end to a turbulent political career, your parting praise for the virtues of compromise the final laughable microcosm of many years worth of a near pathological lack of self awareness. Brexit was, is, and will continue to be a maelstrom of complications that will prove just as impossible to navigate for your successor. You were handed a poisoned chalice from the word go, so let us judge not on the fact you fucked up a Sisyphean effort and instead judge you on everything else. Unfortunate, then, that everything else was also absolutely fucking awful. I’ll not relish your tears, but I will relish the departure of a vindictive and brittle leader who did nothing but exacerbate and inflame the burning injustices she pretended to care about. Let’s not mess about; it’s not leadership to address the oncoming storm by throwing a bucket of diarrhoea into the wind and insisting we mindlessly march forwards. We stink now. We stink and it’s all on you.
It must be some small shred of comfort to you to know that you won’t be remembered as the worst Prime Minister in the country’s history. That honour will almost certainly go to to whoever takes over – a cursory look at the likely candidates makes that immediately obvious.
Jeremy Never-Knowingly-Not-A Hunt is already in and why not – his career trajectory has already taught him that however spectacularly he fails, he can only ever do so upwards. Rory Stewart looks like he dressed up as himself for a Halloween party but couldn’t get the hair quite right. Andrea Leadsom might scrape it if she manages to avoid judging everyone else’s uterus on the way up this time. Esther McVey’s declared because it’s 2019 and of course the Antichrist has swapped their chariot of screaming corpses for some media training and a pantsuit. Reliable as clockwork, Michael Gove put his hand up because he just never learns and somehow still sees Christopher Reeve when he looks in the mirror rather than the fire-damaged Jim Henson puppet of a salamander that the rest of us do.
There are just so many options, each of them more horrific and terrifying the deeper you go, a turducken made entirely of the sphincter meat of every vermin species going. Dominic Raab wants a go and why not? He’s got the won’t-quit attitude the job demands; he once masturbated with a handful of loose office staples through the entirety of The Hills Have Eyes and didn’t blink once. Sajid Javid could take over! He’s brown enough to sweep that whole pesky ‘erm guys, the whole party is intrinsically Islamophobic’ issue right under the carpet. Priti Patel might fancy it if she can find time in her schedule between dislocating her jaw to swallow orphans whole and organising meetings with Satan without parliamentary approval. Fuck it, maybe Liz Truss will be the one to pull the sword from the enormous wheel of proper British cheese. Oh and don’t forget Matt Hancock, said no-one ever, including Matt Hancock’s wife.
And if Boris gets it?
Congratulations, Theresa May. You’ll look positively fucking competent in comparison to that reckless shyster. If the Conservative party has any spine or sense or genuine desire to preserve any shred of either peace in Northern Ireland or our relationship with Europe, he’ll be tarred and feathered and cast out in the first round and humiliated. He won’t be, though, because a Conservative party paralysed and held hostage by a tiny faction of Brexit ultras and jingoistic fools powered by nothing but their own bottomless ambition is Theresa May’s ultimate legacy. For a woman with such a spectacular lack of presence it’s almost impressive that removing you creates a power vacuum so colossal that it sucks in the very real possibility of a far right future for this country. Chris fucking Grayling would do a better job by simple virtue of continuing to fail to do anything.
As for your own future? Speaking tours seem unlikely for a former Prime Minister who struggles with the physical act of speaking, sounding all too often like a nervous turkey choking on a kazoo. Reality television isn’t the right fit for you either and after three years of dancing on thin ice it feels unlikely that you’d fancy doing it on ITV. More likely then that you’ll simply enjoy a quiet retirement, nestled safely by the millions your profiteering husband makes out of the slow dismantling of the state.
You’re free now, Theresa May. Free of the shackles of responsibility, free from the conniving, the sneering, the constant pathetic jockeying for position. You can run wild and unfettered through your happiest of places.
I see you, Theresa May, your arms outstretched as you sprint through the fields. I see the path you carve through the gold ocean of wheat, giggling as you go, the hot summer sun warming both your skin and your heart. You can hear only your own laughter and the rushing of the stalks past your ears.
In the distance, bearing down on you like a shark, I hear the roar of the engine. I see the blades spinning as the combine harvester closes in, your tiny frame making a beeline for its whirring jaws. Too late to change course now, Theresa May. Best to do what you’ve always done. Bury your head and plough on regardless – what’s the worst that could happen?
I see you, Theresa May. I fucking see you.
