There are 28 days left until the election. Not just any election, mind you, arguably one of the most important in recent history which, as things stand, is being talked about as though its outcome is inevitable. More worrying than this, is the fact that instead of the future of the NHS, how we’re going to fix the housing crisis or fund social care for our ageing population we are, once again, talking about whether or not people should be permitted to hunt foxes with dogs. It’s not just your imagination, we really are going back in time. Tony Blair’s back, baking is cool once more and it’s perfectly fine to be a woman in public life and not be a feminist.
In other boring news, the Prime Minister and her husband took to the One Show’s sofas to give a revelatory tell-all interview. This is what we’d all been waiting for. Finally, an expose which would reveal the inner machinations of Theresa May: why did she campaign for Remain in the EU referendum? What does she really think of Boris Johnson? And, perhaps most importantly of all, what does ‘Brexit means Brexit’ actually mean?
It was the first time that the PM and bae had ever been interviewed on TV together so, understandably, citizens across the country were fizzing with excitement. What does the first bae really think about the brown shoes/black suit debate? Does he prefer olive or coconut oil? Does he think the PM has too many pairs of shoes? Did he vote Remain?
Sadly, these and other questions remain unanswered. The Prime Minister, whose press is being very carefully managed, was wise to give an interview to the One Show, famed for brightly coloured sofas and anodyne questions, and did so knowing that it would be as humdrum as the rest of the election campaign. There was an irony, lost on few, that the day which sees discussion of her most personal interview to date, is also the day that a row has broken out over allegations from senior journalists that the Prime Minister’s team are only allowing pre-selected questions to be asked at press events.
Perhaps the most controversial part of the interview, if Twitter reactions are anything to go by, was T-May’s statement that there are ‘boy jobs and girl jobs’ in her house and that P-May does ‘the boy jobs’ like taking out the bins. You’d hardly call what followed the Prime Minister’s retrograde gendered division of labour based on age old stereotyped an uproar, but it’s fair to say people were unimpressed:
What’s a little tacit reinforcing of gender norms between friends, anyway? To P-May’s credit, he did also say ‘if you’re the kind of man who expects his tea to be on the table at six O’clock every evening’ then being married to a Prime Minister probably isn’t for you. Hardly a feminist battle cry, but good of him to warn men everywhere about the perils of marrying a ‘strong and stable’ woman.
Other important bases were covered, fear not. Theresa May confirmed that she likes ‘buying nice shoes’ and so, continues to buy them. P-May ‘quite likes ties’ he’s also into jackets, ‘stuff like that’ he said, ‘Normal’. We need an election buzzword klaxon. One that sounds loudly every time the Prime Minister utters the words ‘strong’, ‘stable’ or ‘normal’ for this is the new ‘take back control’, a phrase which still causes me to flinch every time I hear it.
Perhaps there was an era in which the Meet the Mays interview would have been interesting despite their excruciating attempts to be anything but. Or, maybe we’re just numbed and bored by everything these days because the news itself is so fantastical that it could almost be fiction. We know no more bout Theresa May than we knew before her primetime TV appearance. What has been confirmed is that the Prime Minister is desperate to come across as a very ordinary person who has found themselves in a totally extraordinary position and is determined to 'get on with it' no matter what, and that's a head in the sand keep calm carry on approach which reminds me of when I ask my Brexit-voting grandmother whether she regrets her decision and she says 'no point overthinking it, it's done now...'
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.