RAF AKROTIRI, Cyprus — The doubters thought it would be over by Christmas for Theresa May — but (a few days allowing) the U.K. prime minister survives 2017.
Just don’t call her “Madame Brexit.”
May’s final trip of the year — to the Polish capital of Warsaw along with five of her Cabinet and on to see British armed forces in Cyprus — was meant to be about more than Brexit and Brussels.
There was a new bilateral defense deal with fellow EU rebel Poland, and a prime ministerial rallying of the troops in the way her less beleaguered predecessor David Cameron used to do. And to finish it all off, May and her entourage watched a demonstration of RAF prowess during the flight home.
Yet despite her best efforts, May cannot escape the specter of Brexit.
A slip of the tongue from a translator relaying her press conference with the Polish prime minister neatly characterized how, despite her best efforts, May has struggled to achieve the premiership she craves — she was called “Madame Brexit.”
While amused by the gaffe, May made it clear she was not in a hurry to adopt the moniker.
“Look, I am going to deliver on Brexit. That is undoubtedly the case, but I am doing other things as well,” she insisted to traveling journalists.
Those other things? Skills, education, training, the industrial strategy, global Britain, defense and security, May said.
Theresa May talks with children and their parents at a kindergarten school in Cyprus on December 22 | Petros Karadjias/AFP via Getty Images
Will she stay on beyond 2022 (if allowed, of course)? “I’m in it for the long term,” she declared (again).
Settling into May Force One
While journalists still struggle to get much from a May briefing beyond her robotic “lines to take,” she seems to enjoy life as a traveling prime minister.
In contrast to her first big trip of 2017 to Washington, where she was flanked by her protective (and now departed) joint chiefs of staff Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, neither their replacement Gavin Barwell, nor his deputy Joanna “JoJo” Penn accompanied May to Poland or Cyprus.
It was Press Secretary Paul Harrison, who was only appointed in July, and civil servant Max Blain, her deputy press spokesman, who sat with her in first class at the front of the aircraft as she worked through her red box of government papers.
At one point, officials scoured the plane for a copy of the Times so she could do the Sudoku number puzzle — one of her favorite pastimes.
She also joked with an official who handed her an unusually full red box that she had banked on whiling away the journey home with a book. Her choice of reading material — “The Incredible Crime, a Cambridge Mystery.”
Christmas cards had been written on a trip to Jordan weeks ago and Christmas presents wrapped last Sunday.
Commander in chief
Apart from the odd glimpse of frustration about the press focus on the departure of her third Cabinet minister in a matter of weeks — her old university friend Damian Green, whom she forced to resign just hours before setting off on her foreign travels — there was no acknowledgment from May that it had been a tough year.
“If you look at what’s happened over the past couple of months we have made sufficient progress on the Brexit negotiations, we have had a good Budget that is building a Britain that is fit for the future,” she said in an answer to questions from the press pack which sounded more like a press release.
But the trip at least was a chance to demonstrate who is the boss.
Boris Johnson, whose allies make no secret of his leadership ambitions, supplicated in the front row at her press conference in Warsaw. Chancellor Philip Hammond, who just months ago was reportedly on the verge of being sacked, was at her side on the first leg of the journey to Poland on Thursday morning.
And in Cyprus, May was in full commander-in-chief mode, praising her servicemen and women for their part in crushing ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
Theresa May speaks to troops in Cyprus on December 22 | Petros Karadjias/AFP via Getty Images
On the journey home to a domestic Christmas in her Maidenhead constituency, the prime minister watched first from the cockpit and then the back of the RAF Voyager as two Typhoon jets were scrambled to demonstrate to her what would happen if a Russian plane entered U.K. airspace. The warplanes capped it by re-fuelling from the Voyager in mid-air.
It was all a million miles from Jean-Claude Juncker and the European Commission’s overbearing Berlaymont building.
The attractions of playing the traveling stateswoman are evident and May wants more in 2018. Her planning teams are already lining up a packed travel schedule for the coming months.
But with complex talks on the U.K.’s future relationship with the EU round the corner and a civil service consumed by Brexit, it will take more than air miles for May to ditch the “Madame Brexit” label.