There are some things I’m just not very good at. The older I get the less inclined I am to try and be good at them. Among them are dancing, tennis and playing pool.
Dancing is just awkward so I avoid it unless I’m in a very dark nightclub. Tennis, in particular, always ends badly. I feel like it’s one of those sports you either learn to be good at growing up because you have parents who pay for lessons, or you don’t. Pool, on the other hand, I just don’t understand or find interesting enough to get to grips with. Countless boyfriends and ex-boyfriends have tried to change this by trying to ‘teach’ me how to ‘be good’ at pool because its ‘actually really easy’.
So, when I saw the Italian prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, challengeTheresa Mayto a game of pool in a video which he had promptly posted to his Facebook page my initial reaction was sympathy.
As she accepts the poisoned chalice…sorry, I mean pool cue...May jokes that she will be ‘hopeless’ but dutifully accepts the challenge lest she look like a bad sport. In the background, her chief of staff Gavin Barwell looks on having shown his boss how to position hand on the table.
The video cuts out before the prime minister takes her shot so, whether or not she succeeded we’ll never know.
Once again, the Prime Minister has been caught on camera doing something out of her comfort zone. And, once again, people will feel inclined to either sympathise with or ridicule her for it.
All of this occurred at a summit in Egypt where the prime minister is holding talks with EU leaders in an attempt to get more concessions for her own Brexit deal. At this point, surely, with just over a month (32 days to be precise) to go before the clock runs out on Article 50, and Britain leaves the EU it all feels particularly ridiculous. If you can't play pool, don't try in order to be reliable just get on with sorting Brexit out and put people out of their misery.
We stand on a cliff edge, our main political parties splintering and our politicians unable to agree on the best version of Brexit to move forward. The jokes come all to easily. Chief Secretary to the Treasury and supported of May, Liz Truss tweeted the video with the caption ‘Pleased to see nothing’s been taken off the table’ while others jokes that Britain is ‘snookered’.
But, Brexit is not a game. Far from it, it’s becoming increasingly real with every day that goes by. So real, in fact, that Theresa May is facing growing calls from her own party to delay Brexit rather than leave the EU on March 29th with no deal in place. You’d think someone might have advised Theresa May that maybe, just maybe, the optics of her playing pool poorly with an EU leader right now aren’t great.
Yesterday, May announced that MPs will be given a new vote on her deal by 12 March – also known as a ‘meaningful vote’ – but this itself has caused contention because MPs were hoping to have a say much sooner.
Jeremy Corbyn has responded by accusing the prime minister of ‘running down the clock’ until things become so urgent that MPs are forced ‘to choose between her deal and a disastrous no deal’.
For a long time now there have been suggestions that Theresa May is the political equivalent of Snape in Harry Potter. Elusive, hard to read and ostensibly one of the bad guys but, perhaps, deep down a good guy with a master plan so complex it’s beyond all of us.
Increasingly, though, it seems that she’s making it up as she goes along as much as anyone, apart from the Italian prime minister who knows a good Instagram opportunity when he sees one.