Theresa May preaches to Davos sinners

Theresa May always takes a pause before speaking. I wonder if it’s something she learnt from her father as he waited for the congregation to settle.

At Davos, after that brief pause, she preached to the very “citizens of nowhere” she had castigated in her 2016 Tory Conference speech and she delivered a rebuke for past sins and a lesson of inclusion.  The global elite couldn’t carry on the way it had, taking all the cream and failing to play by fair rules, sharing proceeds and paying their dues.

Theresa May took on the mantle of telling the privileged elites they needed to wake up and step up to their responsibilities at her very first international gathering when she attended the G20 in Hangzhou in September last year. Volatile politics was a wake-up call to business and political leaders she said back then and, at greater length, this morning in Davos.

We have yet to see the meat of Mrs May’s own programme for dealing with this new crisis of capitalism. The Prime Minister has talked big but we still await promised reforms on housing and the new industrial strategy (a green paper expected next week) and much else. And it is a struggle to see right now how they will measure up to the rhetoric.

Any sermon on “inclusion” in Western liberal democracies traditionally calls for more state-administered redistribution, more tax and spend. Talk to those who’ve chatted through where she wants to take the country and you repeatedly hear that Mrs May’s mantra in private is the need for government to get more from less.

Some talk of signs of a tension between the more drastic language and solutions favoured by her massively influential Joint Chief of Staff Nick Timothy and her own instincts. Some see an echo of David Cameron’s intellectual tendresse for Steve Hilton’s drastic proto-Trumpian take on government which was strained and then eventually broken by his sense of what was actually feasible. There’s absolutely no sign of a breach between Mrs May and her senior adviser but could it come as a gap develops between what she feels she should say to match the needs of the moment and what she actually feels comfortable delivering.

Theresa May has already sanctioned Philip Hammond to talk about looking again at ring-fenced benefits for older citizens. Simon Stevens at NHS England vented his frustration last week at the PM’s resistance to demands for more money. Privately, one close to her said, she wonders whether the growth rates we’ve known in the past will return. No wonder she wants business leaders gathered in Davos to dip into their own money sacks and share more dosh. Judging by the muted applause after her speech in Davos, they’ll take some gettyconvincing. President Xi, I’m told, got a much warmer reception. As Margaret Thatcher (no fan of industrial strategies herself) said to the Cabinet in 1990, “it’s a funny old world.”