I’ve spent too much of my time recently on Brexit-watch (I have even had dreams about Brexit, which is sad), but as I was thinking about it I realised that one of Theresa May’s problems was that she was both stubborn and stupid, which aren’t the best attributes if you are negotiating a complex agreement in a highly confined political space.

Don’t take my word for this. Take the word instead of the former Conservative MP Matthew Parris:

She is mean. She is rude. She is cruel. She is stupid. I have heard that from almost everyone who has dealt with her.

Of course, that implies that might be a 2×2 here. What might the opposite of ‘stubborn’ be? And ‘stupid’? Well, let’s draw it.

If Theresa May is in the bottom left box, who might be in the others? A friend who used to work in Whitehall suggested that we could track our last four Prime Ministers this way. Blair is Smart and Flexible; Brown, Smart and Stubborn; Cameron, Stupid and Flexible.

All of these might be horses for courses. Smart and Flexible might create new political openings, but it also leads to the Third Way and the Iraq War. You can see how Smart and Stubborn might lead to the brooding suspicion that often characterised Gordon Brown’s political style, but it was effective in reducing child poverty levels and was also, probably, the reason why Britain’s banks  remained solvent and open during the financial crisis. (Osborne might be in the same space, which led to his over-commitment to austerity in the face of the evidence, and endless Cunning Plans that were apparently going to destroy the Labour Party for a generation).

In terms of the Brexit catastrophe, we would have been better off had Cameron been Stubborn and Stupid and May Stupid and Flexible. Cameron would then have been less cavalier about a referendum, and May would have had more than a single Plan A that she is clearly over-identified with and over-committed to, in the face of overwhelming Commons defeats that a Flexible politician would have learned from. By “catastrophe,” to be clear, I mean the huge costs of all of the consequences of proceeding with the referendum, from the re-normalisation of racism, to the damaging effects on present and future household prosperity, to the collapse of British influence and soft power as a result of becoming an international laughing stock.

In case people think I’m making a political point about intelligence, Churchill was also Smart and Stubborn, which was a useless set of characteristics during the 1930s, when he was on the backbenches obsessed with the India question, but valuable during the 1940s as a war leader. Macmillan was probably Smart and Flexible, which meant that he was able to persuade the Conservative Party that de-colonising winds were blowing through Africa.

And Jeremy Corbyn is probably Stupid and Flexible, perhaps because he delegates the things he’s not interested in to his colleagues.

Of course, a 2×2 is a model, and “All models are wrong. Some are useful.” There are some politicians that don’t fit in as tidily; John Major’s pragmatic party management, perhaps. And of course, Donald Trump is all over the map.

Images courtesy of Wikipedia.