The Abuse of Power: Confronting Injustice in Public Life

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In what might have been an unremittingly bleak account of British public failures, she finds heroes – more often heroines – to admire, from the campaigning Hillsborough families to the medical expert Dr Isabel Gal, who spotted the dangers of Primodos and was persecuted for it; or the youth worker Jayne Senior and the South Yorkshire Police analyst Angie Heal, who tried desperately hard to blow the whistle on the Rotherham child abuse cases, and were threatened for their pains. The standard-model memoir has three purposes: to settle scores, to nudge the dial of the historical verdict, and above all to win a publisher’s advance that is unlikely to be earned out. The resulting book is reviewed everywhere and read nowhere. The British public, who voted the author in, barely features, except as comic extras writing cranky letters and making ignorant observations at by-elections. A valiant trawl through the new prime minister’s record… Prince’s narrative energy never flags.’ Rafael Behr, The Guardian Before this review is written off as one written by a hard-line leftie, let me be clear that that is absolutely not the case. I respect Theresa May and her public service and I do believe that she is worth listening to. May tries to be as reflective as possible, accepting that her premiership will largely be remembered for her failure to deliver Brexit, and that the 2017 election in which she lost the Conservative majority was her mistake. But of course we are all only self-aware up to a point, and I wonder whether she might also reflect that some might see an attempt at abuse of power in the very act of calling the election.

That being said, this is one of the worst and most pointless books I’ve ever read. This book genuinely makes me angry. Again, I refused. I resisted both of these proposals, not just because of the implications for the role of parliament, but mainly because of my firm belief that it would have been unthinkable to bring the monarch into these matters. By sanctioning the idea of prorogation, the hard-line Brexiteers were taking a sledgehammer to the British constitution.”Rather like that unexpected gesture, this is a pleasant surprise: a genuinely unusual, bold and important book. You can’t say that of many political memoirs. She says little about Boris Johnson and David Cameron, but it’s not hard to guess at whom she has in mind when she talks at length about vain MPs who see politics as a career, not a chance to serve. If we find politicians who put “the common good above personal interest,” she concludes, we “might be able to consign the abuse of power to the past”. But this optimistic thought is contradicted by the powerful examples in her book: where good people (herself included) presided over appalling injustices. That’s why the real villain of The Abuse of Power is a deserving one: the intransigent bureaucracies that, after 13 years of Tory rule, are more powerful than ever.

In the final weeks of her tortured premiership, Theresa May hosted a lunch in Portsmouth to mark the 75th anniversary of the D-day landings. The leaders present included Donald Trump and Angela Merkel. When May made some remarks about what the countries represented around the table had achieved, Trump just had to interject: “Except Germany.” May fixed him with a hard stare and said: “Donald, behave.” He then shut up. Her premiership might have gone differently had she been able to discipline her own party like that.After a very long wait, those bereaved by the Hillsborough disaster finally received a full admission by the state of who was truly to blame and an apology in parliament as a result of an inquiry originally set up under New Labour when Alan Johnson was home secretary. May seeks credit for herself – this comes over as rather needy – for deciding to let the Hillsborough independent panel continue when she took over at the Home Office. That scandal occurred long before she was anywhere near government so she finds it easy to use it to present herself as an enemy of injustice and a champion of its victims. Mrs May said: “Time and time again, during my period in government, I saw public institutions abusing their power by seeking to defend themselves in the face of challenge rather than seek the truth.

The former premier said the volume would investigate how public institutions “abuse their power rather than seek the truth”. Publishers Headline said she would “pull no punches” as she lifts the lid on her six years as home secretary and three as prime minister.May defines “abuse of power” as acting to protect one’s own position. The words “mote” and “plank” spring to mind. After all, was it not an abuse of power to try to trigger article 50 to commence the two-year Brexit negotiations without a vote in parliament? The book, The Abuse of Power, will reveal how “the powerful repeatedly choose to use their power not in the interests of the powerless but to serve themselves or to protect the organisation to which they belonged”.

There’s a standard political memoir, isn’t there? It bubbles along as if scripted by a politically savvy AI engine: amusing and affecting anecdotes of the hero’s early life and university successes; feelings of inadequacy on reaching parliament; vivid descriptions of the scramble up the ladder, including quotable digs at rivals and opponents; the strange absence of the scandal for which the author will be mainly remembered; the self-aggrandising account of the author’s many successes in office, this part at wearisome length. There was a concerted and mendacious effort to traduce the fans as drunken hooligans by “police, the media and some politicians”. That’s true without being as accurate as it might be. May is not always as hard-hitting as she could be when her own party and its allies are complicit in the abuse. She should have written (my additions in italics) that the smear campaign was conducted by “police, the right wing media and some Conservative politicians”. She will set out a “searing expose of injustice” and call for politicians to act in the greater good. In explaining why she floundered so badly, he makes the excellent point that she was the first prime minister of modern times to become such with no experience as either leader of the opposition or chancellor, the two frontline roles other than prime minister that demand high performative skills and a grasp of policy across the range. Her apprenticeship was six years at the Home Office, a department with onerous responsibilities, but a narrow perspective. It was also a place where she could conceal her pronounced flaws behind the steely mask she wore for the world.Our democracy depends on people having trust in their public institutions and politicians.” 'Unflinching account' Already, by now, the reader may be thinking – hold on, this was someone at the top of the state for many years. Shouldn’t she be apologising for things that went wrong, rather than denouncing others, most of them more junior? Who had responsibility for the standards and the ethos of the Home Office for half a dozen years? Who presided over a culture of institutional ignorance and arrogance towards the Windrush generation? Who was the home secretary when the department received warnings that many of them were being wrongly treated as illegal immigrants? Who had failed to foresee and avoid a scandal that the inquiry into it concluded was “foreseeable and avoidable”?