Theresa May’s premiership, particularly its second, post-2017 election phase, has been punctuated by speeches that bore at the very best a tenuous relationship to political reality. Today she provided a surreal, at times barely believable full stop in the shape of a valedictory speech that posed far more questions than it answered.
Addressing an audience at Chatham House, May offered a lengthy – and wholly uncharacteristic – defence of compromise in politics. She bemoaned the rise of populism on both sides of the Atlantic, criticised the creep of absolutist language into political discourse, attacked nations whose governments treat diplomacy as a “zero-sum game”, warned that “words have consequences”, and urged political leaders of all ideological persuasions to seek consensus in the centre ground.
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