The PM got reporters excited with a secretive valedictory speech

When a major politician makes a big speech, it’s rare for its contents to come as a complete surprise to lobby correspondents in Westminster.

Details are often given to Sunday newspapers a few days in advance, excerpts are briefed on the eve of the speech and advisers make themselves available to give a steer and a hint about the minister’s thinking.

So when Downing Street announced that Theresa May’s last significant speech as prime minister would not be pre-briefed at all, journalists’ appetites were well and truly whetted.

What surprises could she have in store for us? A mea culpa for the many mistakes and failings of her premiership? A warning for her successor? A savaging of her enemies? A candid assessment of the merits of the Brexit project or of its chief cheerleader Boris Johnson?

With the end of her tenure within sight, would the PM finally shed the cautious and secretive habits of her premiership, ditch the Maybot style, and let rip about how she really felt?

Those of us who crowded hopefully into Chatham House did not have to wait long to be disappointed. This was Theresa May – and candour and reflection have never been her style.

As the speech wore on, we realised with dismay that what she had in mind was a bit of a gripe about bad stuff going on in the world today – people being rude to each other on the internet, populists preying on public disgruntlement – as well as a large helping of self-justification about her part in it all.

While others had indulged in “rancour and tribal bitterness”, she apparently had worked in a spirit of “compromise and cooperation”. While “most people across our country”, in her account, wanted a Brexit deal of the kind she struck with Brussels, a “polarised” parliament insisted on taking a “winner-takes-all approach to leaving or remaining”.

Members of her audience scratched their heads. Was this the woman who laid into the “citizens of nowhere”, who took a 52/48 vote split as blanket support for hard Brexit and waited until the last possible moment before seeking cross-party agreement? The woman who responded to reasonable queries about her plans by endlessly parroting “Brexit Means Brexit”?

Challenged on this, she did acknowledge that she did not get “every single phrase” right during her premiership and even admitted that there was one word – “queue-jumpers”, when referring to EU workers – which she wished she hadn’t said.

To make matters worse for the hacks, even while lashing out at all those who frustrated her plans, the PM was reluctant to name names.

Key attack lines in her valedictory address were clearly directed at Boris Johnson, at Donald Trump, at Jacob Rees-Mogg and his acolytes of the European Research Group. But quizzed after she finished, her aides were insistent that, no, she didn’t have any specific individuals in mind, it was all just a general overview of the political scene.

So Theresa May left the stage as she had occupied it – obfuscatory and defensive, with barely a flicker of self-awareness. Consumed by bitterness at the actions of her enemies, but lacking the confidence or strength to confront them and overcome them. A fitting end to a deeply dispiriting three years.

Yours,

Andrew Woodcock

Political editor