Theresa May’s disjunctive premiership: Choice and constraint in political time
| DOI | 10.1177/13691481211016931 |
| Author | Kevin Theakston,Chris Byrne,Nick Randall |
| Date | 01 November 2021 |
| Published date | 01 November 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481211016931
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2021, Vol. 23(4) 699 –716
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13691481211016931
journals.sagepub.com/home/bpi
Theresa May’s disjunctive
premiership: Choice and
constraint in political time
Chris Byrne1, Nick Randall2
and Kevin Theakston3
Abstract
Theresa May’s premiership is widely acknowledged to have been a failure, but political
commentators and the scholarly literature have, thus far, tended to focus on May’s misuse of her
agency. This article argues that May’s premiership presents a particularly powerful example of the
need to disentangle structure and agency when assessing prime ministerial performance. Drawing
upon the work of Stephen Skowronek, it sets out a framework of evaluating prime ministerial
agency in ‘political time’. This is then used to show how the conditions and circumstances in which
May governed limited the feasibility, increased the costs, and compromised the effectiveness of
her actions in office. We argue that this confirms that May was a victim of circumstances as much
as a victim of her own agency.
Keywords
historical institutionalism, leadership evaluation, political time, prime minister(s), structure and
agency, Theresa May
Introduction
Theresa May’s resignation met an unsparing response. Commentators censured a ‘miser-
able and poisonous legacy’ (The Guardian, 2019) and a ‘pitifully short’ list of achieve-
ments (The Daily Telegraph, 2019). Several indicted May as ‘the worst PM since Lord
North’ (e.g. Beattie, 2019; Macpherson, 2019). In Westminster, neither prospective suc-
cessors nor those seeking an alternative Brexit trajectory had incentive to submit more
generous assessments.
Alongside these partisan evaluations stands an emerging literature considering May’s
premiership in whole (e.g. Seldon and Newell, 2019) or in part (e.g. Allen, 2018). May’s
1Leeds School of Social Sciences, Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, UK
2School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
3School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
Corresponding author:
Nick Randall, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University, Henry Daysh Building,
Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK.
Email: nick.randall@newcastle.ac.uk
1016931BPI0010.1177/13691481211016931The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsByrne et al.
research-article2021
Original Article
700 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 23(4)
handling of Brexit, naturally, receives considerable scrutiny (Marlow-Stevens and
Hayton, 2020; McConnell and Tormey, 2020). Her ideology (Hickson et al., 2020), per-
formative politics (Atkins and Gaffney, 2020), party management (Roe-Crines et al.,
2020), and leadership capital (Worthy and Bennister, 2020) have also received attention.
These studies concur that May’s leadership was a failure, but they skirt around the more
challenging question her premiership presents: how should we account for her inability to
meet her most important objectives?
May’s premiership demonstrates the imperative of carefully identifying the roles of
structure, context, and agency in prime ministerial performance (Byrne and Theakston,
2019). The default position has been to focus, implicitly or explicitly, on May’s personal
weaknesses and shortcomings as leader. McConnell and Tormey’s (2020) study of Brexit
as a ‘policy fiasco’ has, thus far, been most attuned to situating May’s agency alongside
institutional and policy constraints. But, ultimately, they sidestep disentangling structure
and agency.
Here we seek to confront the question of structure, context, and agency directly. We do
not dispute that May’s premiership was a failure. However, we argue that the constraints
upon May must be better contextualised and understood. These constraints, we argue, can
be understood within a comparative analytical framework. Drawing upon Stephen
Skowronek’s (1993, 2011) ‘political time’ framework we identify May as a ‘disjunctive’
prime minister. We propose that the structuralist tendencies of Skowronek’s account nev-
ertheless require correction. We therefore set out a framework of prime ministerial agency
in political time. This is then employed to demonstrate how the structure and context of
the regime’s vulnerabilities limited the feasibility, increased the costs, and compromised
the effectiveness of May’s actions in office.
Theresa May as a disjunctive prime minister
Like her Brexit deal, it would be possible to evaluate May’s premiership in bespoke
fashion. However, to do so would neglect existing frameworks for the evaluation of
prime ministerial performance, sidestep the controversies associated with them, and
forego the opportunities that May’s tenure presents to reassess and refine these
frameworks.
Most contemporary non-academic assessments of May, especially those of journalists,
insisted upon her disastrous choices and misuse of her agency. She was ‘the author of her
own downfall’ (The Sun, 2019) and failed ‘because she lacked the requisite political skills
of a national leader’ (Financial Times, 2019). Political rivals echoed such claims. Boris
Johnson’s resignation letter, for example, damned her for leading ‘our vanguard into bat-
tle with the white flags fluttering above them’.
This primacy of agency in these assessments of May is representative of the tendencies
in the broader literature evaluating British prime ministers. The leadership style model,
derived from Greenstein’s (2009) work, rests on the premise that personal skills and per-
sonality are powerfully determinative of leadership performance (see, for example,
Theakston, 2011). The statecraft model, derived from Bulpitt’s (1986) account of
Thatcherism, recognises institutional, party political, and electoral constraints, but still
prioritises prime ministerial agency above structure and context. Buller and James’ (2015)
morphogenetic account of statecraft widens the consideration of structural contexts,
according these greater weight, but ultimately retains a highly agent-centred view of lead-
ership (see Byrne and Theakston, 2019, for further discussion).
To continue reading
Request your trial