Why we shouldn't feel sorry for Theresa May

Well dinnae.

I ken maist Scots would rather hear nails driven down a blackboard than the PM’s supercilious tones, avoiding questions on every serious moral issue from British arms deals to Saudi Arabia, to the endless nightmare of Universal Credit, her ludicrous contention that austerity is over and, of course, the continuing car crash of Brexit.

But, as you watch this tall, slightly hunched, isolated figure turn up for a weekly mauling in London, Brussels and everywhere else she travels, straining every political sinew to deliver an EU-free future she personally abhors, you do wonder how the Tory leader manages to get up every morning and paste on the cheery face.

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Now, I realise the ability to inhabit a semi-permanent mask of fake happiness is a prerequisite for achieving high public office. Once inside “the bubble,” there seems to be no option but to keep going, even when everyone else can see it’s time to quit and survival means clutching for power in the most humiliating Gordon Brown-like manner.

But no political leader in recent times has worn the mask of manic optimism as long and convincingly as Theresa May against the backdrop of such a truly horrendous economic and political gathering storm.

Let’s face it. This prime minister faces hourly threats to her leadership from every political point on the compass – especially her own.

She has an impossible circle to square on Brexit and even if the ghastly need to please the un-biddable DUP is the consequence of her own ill-fated snap election, I wouldn’t wish the need for daily phone encounters with Arlene Foster on almost anyone.

It’s also true – as outspoken feminist historian Mary Beard suggested recently – that the men who engineered this disastrous situation pushed Theresa May to preside over the inevitable shipwreck of Brexit while retreating to the margins, waiting like hoodies to swoop on the carcass of her leadership at the first available opportunity.

And the threat of political defeat is now so constant she could be facing a formal leadership challenge by the time you read this, after a meeting of her own party’s 1922 Committee. Remember, this Tory backbenchers’ organisation helped unseat Margaret Thatcher, and one of its current number briefed journalists that the beleaguered May should bring her own noose to the meeting. This aggressive and threatening use of language of course backfired, prompting objections from all and sundry including Nicola Sturgeon, which might mean the 1922 Committee meeting was more civilised than many predicted. But that just ensures the inevitable moment of confrontation with her own Brexit shock troops has been postponed for another few hours, days or weeks.

Any normal person would be shredded by the relentless strain of it all. Yet despite the pressure, maybe even because of it, Theresa May manages to appear dutiful, mindlessly optimistic and even gaily combative.

She bounded into Prime Minister’s Question yesterday like a woman possessed, despatching questions about the supposed end of austerity by Jeremy Corbyn with Snow Queen-like steely composure.

Even the excellent interrogation by SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford, above, over British arms sales to Saudi Arabia bounced off an evasive Theresa May like water off a duck’s back.

She might not have been born to dance, but Theresa May was certainly born to be a Tory prime minister – batting away criticism with invented statistics, carefully constructed half-truths and predictable caricatures of her opponents’ positions.

She appears utterly impervious to reason, doubt or the urge to even consider the conflicting views of other democratically elected devolved governments.

No wonder the Prime Minister has so far seen off every political challenge from her spineless Tory detractors. They resign, carp, plot and insult her. She ploughsvaliantly on.

But there might be another reason for her serene composure.

It could be that Theresa May is simply impervious to everything.

Why would the Tory leader lose a wink of sleep over the combined betrayals of Boris, Davis and Jacob Rees-Mogg when the sanctions-related suicides of countless claimants have had no visible impact on her at all?

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Why would the stress of failed European summits damage her self confidence, when she has the brass-neck to stand in the Commons and insist that Universal Credit is a success, despite hungry children, evicted families, heaving social work caseloads, inundated food banks and thousands of her countrymen and women facing lifetimes of debt, anxiety and crucifying levels of stress – all in the name of some dogmatic point of principle about the merits of becoming “work-ready?”.

Why would Theresa May bat an eyelid about any confrontation with Tory colleagues about her leadership when she presides over a system in which disabled children and lone older people will soon lose half their benefits?

Why have any second thoughts about the merits of her accursed mum-dancing when she doesn’t have a second thought about the cruel and vindictive bedroom tax – still punishing (mostly) disabled people for failing to find non-existent one-bedroom flats in England and Wales?

Why feel a sense of dread about going down in history as the woman who delivered a catastrophic no-deal Brexit, when you’ve already caused Commonwealth-born British citizens to face persecution and deportation and promoted a cost-cutting culture that led directly to so many deaths in Grenfell Tower? In short, why would any of the current Brexit-related difficulties faze Theresa May when she has managed to sleep at night for the last two years, despite the many cruel excesses of her “reforming” government?

Maybe we should pity Theresa May for being stuck on a permanent, righteous autopilot. After all, American film star Jane Fonda, 80, recently told a radio interviewer that while she’s against the policies of the Trump administration, she has a vague understanding of where they come from.

“This is a man who was traumatised as a child by his father, who had a mother that didn’t protect him, and the behaviour is the language of the wounded,” she said. “So, you have to have empathy for him as a human being, while you hate what he does.”

That’s a supremely rational outlook few opponents will feel able to share as the “wounded” Trump prepares to tear up the international nuclear rulebook. But it’s true that the vain, self-regarding, suspicious behaviour of Donald Trump suggests he is dangerous, damaged goods. What is Theresa May’s excuse?

Until there is the faintest note of contrition for the misery she’s inflicted as home secretary and prime minister, I have no jot of sympathy for her current plight.

As the Bible says, ye reap as ye sow – and that’s a bitter, bitter harvest.