Paul Bryant's Reviews > Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem

It was in the middle of the big meeting, the one to decide who was the new boss of the whole gang. Suddenly the table was overturned, guns appeared in several hands, and death was the decision maker. Within two minutes three bodies hit the floor. The rest of them fled into the night. Except, in the silence, from behind the bar, one stooped figure scuttled to where the bag of jewels and cash lay, scooped it up and padded silently away from the bloody scene.

That’s how Theresa May became leader of the Conservative Party in 2015 and therefore Prime Minister of the UK.



This book tells the story in microscopic detail of what happened next. Turned out that for Theresa the Vicar’s daughter, trouble was her middle name. It also turned out that she was – like that guy in Alien – actually an android.



giving answers that seemed to have been churned out by a malfunctioning android programmed with a meagre diet of soundbites

She’s such an odd person to be prime minister. It’s like she wants to be anywhere but there. So awkward physically, she walks like a very tall crab, stooped and ungainly, would suit the role of sinister butler in Arsenic and Old Lace. And she purely hates to be interviewed, all her smiles look like grimaces, as though someone is pointing a gun at her favourite pet’s brains off-camera, as an encouragement – smile Theresa, you can do it. It’s not that she looks like she doesn’t want to go anywhere near ordinary voters, she looks like she doesn’t want to be anywhere near other human beings at all. Rather be in a room on her own writing something down. Making a list.

She’s the accidental prime minister, only got there because all the big names stabbed each other to death. (At the same time Jeremy Corbyn is the accidental leader of Labour, only got there because of a bunch of excitable 20 somethings on Facebook; at the same time Trump is the accidental President of the USA, at least, I hope it was an accident.)

THE SNAP ELECTION OF 2017

Theresa’s big task was to deliver some kind of Brexit but she only had a little teeny majority in Parliament - 17 seats. This meant that if 9 Conservatives voted with the opposition because they didn’t like her Brexit plan, everything would grind to a halt. So she wanted a BIG majority, and look – a couple of months after she became PM her party was way ahead of the now far-left socialist Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn was regularly denounced as a deluded antisemitic Marxist who couldn’t run a bath, never mind a country, so now was the time…. Except that for a year she told everyone read my lips there will be no new election called I will not call an election no means no absolutely not but okay yeah I want a big majority so I know I said all that but I’m calling an election.

And it all went horribly wrong after that, but you can’t blame her. I would have called that election.

One MP described the next part of the story :

We were steaming under blue skies and then we created our own iceberg and steered our own campaign towards it.

THIS LONG ASS BOOK

Is for anyone who likes geeking out on British politics. It’s 18 months of news seen from the inside, on the vicious backbiting gossip level. Lots of fun, way too much detail:

At one point that week, Timothy approached Hill and ruffled her hair from behind on one side before moving to the other side when she turned her head. They both laughed.

A FEW QUIPS

Before the election:

Except for calling a snap election, Mrs May has barely said or done anything interesting for eleven months and yet is the subject of fevered fan-worship usually reserved for One Direction and Kim Kardashian’s bottom.

During the election:

It’s like trying to organize a bunch of cats in the middle of a firework display.

After the election:

I think it’s cruel to keep her. It is like the scene in a Bruce Willis movie where the terrorist who is already shot gets used as a human sandbag to help him get from point A to point B. That is what the party is doing to her at the moment.

Apparently Theresa May always wanted to be PM. Which is really a very severe case of be careful what you wish for. She is uniquely unqualified to be Prime Minister. She hates the limelight, hates being on tv, hates the reporters, hates making speeches, hates campaigning. What did she think being prime minister consisted of, I wonder? She must be having the most miserable time unless we have a masochist running the country.