LAURA Perrins’s post yesterday ‘No wisdom, no sincerity, no courage, no discipline, no benevolence. May’s Art of War’, in which she wrote that ‘May is the worst Prime Minister since Chamberlain’ provoked many suggestions for alternative candidates for the title, as well as a surge of support for the much-maligned Chamberlain. Here is a selection of extracts:
Jeremiah Jones wrote:
Worst Prime Minister since Chamberlain? Eh? Worst Prime Minister in our entire history, not excluding Lord North. He just lost America. She will lose us our homeland.
franknowzad wrote:
‘Worst PM Evah’ is dominated by the post-1945 list – Mrs T being the exception. Attlee, Wilson, Callaghan and the War Criminal spring to mind. Brown gets a pass by way of insanity.
For Blue Labour Major ruined Maggie’s victory. Douglas-Home and Cameron were irrelevant.
My explanation is that soft courses at Oxbridge rot people’s minds and souls. Anyone who read PPE, eg Wilson and Cameron, should be shunned.
Robert Edwards wrote:
May has many competitors for ‘worst PM ever’. The nearest is probably Eden, closely shadowed by Heath, with Macmillan not far behind.
Rush_is_Right wrote:
I’m fed up with hearing Chamberlain being described as worse than the present nincompoop. Chamberlain was wrong, but he was a decent and intelligent man who didn’t want to start a war that Britain could not afford. Compared with May, he was an outstanding and successful international statesman.
steve3005 wrote:
Even while Chamberlain was signing the Munich Agreement, he was agreeing a huge increase in spending to increase Britain’s armament in preparation for war. We were utterly unprepared for war in 1938. We were unprepared but could put up a fight in 1939.
Don’t compare May to Chamberlain. Chamberlain made the best of a bad deal. May is the cause of the bad deal.
Jolly Radical replied:
Exactly. Chamberlain was a genuine patriot who was dealing with a force that nobody really understood.
May is an EU agent manipulating our political structures to suit a force that everyone understands – the unelected EU leadership.
cerberus wrote:
Laura, please, whatever else he was Chamberlain was not a traitor. That is the difference between the two. I do not believe that he was a serial barefaced liar either, another difference between them.
Uusikaupunki wrote:
I fear you do Chamberlain a disservice – he had seen the horrors of one Great War and tried his level best to avoid another. Who would blame him for that? And, when the writing was on the wall, Munich, for all its faults at least gave this country a year to prepare for inevitable conflict. He was flawed but he was an honourable statesman, unlike . . . shall we call her ‘Lady Halifax’?
Colonel Mustard replied:
Yes, there is a great tendency to condemn Chamberlain in the hindsight of what the Nazis became and the perils of the subsequent war rather than how they looked to him at the time.
Badger wrote:
May is worse than Chamberlain. Chamberlain was a thoroughly decent man who loved his country, there was no malice in him. Yes, he got it disastrously wrong over Hitler but so did most of them. He did realise, almost too late, his mistakes and managed to grab enough time to put just enough Hurricanes and Spitfires in the front line to win the Battle of Britain. Hitler cursed him for getting him to sign that paper. He wanted to invade much earlier.
You say May has no sincerity because she has no credibility. It is deeper than that. She has no principles. She has no political philosophy and is therefore prey to any intellect she admires above her own. Enter Olly Robbins.
May is altogether worse in every respect. I won’t repeat your list of her shortcomings but I have to add that I do not believe she even LIKES her own people, that is the nation itself. It still astonishes me that a person with a political CV listing absolutely nothing but failure made it to the top. She is arrogant, pathologically stubborn, has a closed mind, is a liar and a serial breaker of promises, of very average intelligence and treats her staff incredibly badly. The worst possible choice for the job, and completely out of her depth.
Kojii Naz wrote:
I think her problem is basically autism. She’s on the spectrum, and has neither understanding of people nor any people skills.
LordOfMisrule wrote:
Writing as someone on the autistic spectrum, I genuinely believe May is autistic as well. Her stiff, formal manner. Her lack of social skills. Her inability to read people and situations. Rigidly sticking to rules and routines. She also seems to live in her own little world and does not recognise what people are saying about her. Maybe it is wrong of me to speculate. I know autistic people are good at specific jobs but the duties of a modern PM are very testing even for a neuro typical person.
getahead wrote:
May would have invited Hitler to invade Britain.
Baron_Jackfield wrote:
If I may be permitted to pinch a comment that I saw on another blog that compared May to Chamberlain: ‘At least Chamberlain didn’t offer to finance the Luftwaffe!’
Paul Sutton wrote:
With all this talk of Chamberlain, a solution springs to mind.
Could we disinter whatever remains of the poor sod, and get him over to Brussels today?
That way the EU would be sure to veto and, in any case, he’d be more sincere, more courageous – and certainly more robust – than May.
