Theresa May’s Disastrous Speech, Complete With P45, Coughing And Falling Slogan

When Theresa May made her speech this morning at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, very few people indeed could have expected her appearance to become the perfect metaphor for her ailing premiership of the United Kingdom. During a stuttering, nostalgia-filled address on the baffling theme of “renewing the British dream“, the prime minister was interrupted by a comedic protester who reached onto the stage to hand her a fake P45, a tax statement given to employees upon leaving their job, under the full glare of the media and live on television. This was followed by the Tory leader suffering a persistent bout of coughing, causing her to splutter awkwardly through her words. Then the large slogan behind her, “Building A Country That Works For Everyone” began to fall apart. Quite literally. First went the letter “F” follow shortly thereafter by the “E”. Soon, the electioneering motto read, “Building A Country That Works _or Everyon_”. All in all, if it weren’t for the fact that the minority government led by May is in bed with the fundamentalists of the ultra-right Democratic Unionist Party the whole event could have been dismissed as a political Monty Python sketch.

However with the DUP apparently dictating the manner of the UK’s exit from the European Union in alliance with their fellow xenophobes on the Conservative Party’s backbenches – and in the cabinet itself – Theresa May’s incompetence is no laughing matter. Beholden to an electoral micro-grouping from Britain’s legacy colony in Ireland, the erratic administration in London has yet to put forward any concrete plans on how it will protect the Irish-British peace process following Brexit, or maintain the soft reunification established on this island over the last two decades. Instead May and company are obsessing over the United Kingdom’s imperial past, with revanchist notions of reclaiming its former superpower status. And the (malign) influence which went with it.

Of course, it could be worse. One could be dealing with a UK government led by public schoolboy par excellence, Boris Johnson, with inane toff Jacob Rees-Mogg as his right-hand man.