Andrew Marr didn’t wish Theresa May a 'Happy Birthday' because she's having anything but

How could anyone other than the Arthur Askey-husband (and even then... ) put ‘happy’ and ‘Prime Minister’ in the same sentence without sounding malicious, when no British premier ever had less cause to be happy?

No cake, but a roast: the Prime Minister appeared on the BBC show and came in for a grilling (Reuters)

Andrew Marr’s Tory-conference interview with Theresa May inevitably raised many more questions than it answered. But the one that’s been obsessing me, for all its banality, is this: why didn’t Marr wish her a happy 61st birthday?

Marr is not, professionally, a rude man. Anyone less mannerly would have erupted a dozen times during a lengthy chat in which May was as psychosis-inducingly and mechanically irrelevant as ever. Yet Marr confined himself to an air of mild irritation.

Even when the birthday girl substituted a nervous giggle for a reply as to whether Boris Johnson is sackable, failed to admit her student loan bribe (£30 a month less in repayments; that’ll swing the mortgage application for a Lego maisonette) is a U-turn, and couldn’t accept the imminent Universal Credit roll-out as a calamity in waiting, he kept his temper.

So why would such a courteous fellow eschew the ritual felicitations? My best guess is that when he heard the words “Happy Birthday, Prime Minister” in his head, they sounded so scathingly sarcastic that he couldn’t bring himself to give them voice.

How could anyone other than the Arthur Askey-husband (and even then... ) put “happy” and “Prime Minister” in the same sentence without sounding malicious, when no British premier ever had less cause to be happy?

Even in the bleakest moments of 1940, Churchill had genuine hope of better days ahead. So did John Major when the pound crashed out of the ERM in 1992, even if they no more came for him than for Gordon Brown after he flunked the snap election in 2007.

For May, not flunking a snap election has left her without a slither of optimism. Literally every primate except herself accepts this. There are chimpanzees who now introduce a lively round of faeces-flinging by signing: “This here is what I reckon to May’s prospects” on picking up a turd.

She is pincered between a Kipling-quoting Boris gone exceedingly rogue and her soft Brexiteers. She is squashed between the reality of a young and middle-aged electorate finally awoken to its betrayal by Wild West capitalism, and the timeless fantasy of the Tory right that too much market intervention, rather than too little, is the problem.

She recognises that Jeremy Corbyn’s political convictions chime with public sentiment. But she cannot take more than meaningless baby steps towards the ground he has colonised because his beliefs are in direct conflict with her party’s.

She is isolated and alone, with barely a scintilla of support within or outside her warring cabinet. To the dead woman walking of June, death row must look like paradise. This self-inflicted victim of locked-in syndrome: politically she is paralysed. Small wonder if the character on Marr’s Manchester sofa seemed less an organic life form than a hologramatic projection from a coma bed.

A prevailing trope in modern sci-fi movies (Ghost In The Shell, the magnificent new Blade Runner sequel, et all) is examining the distinction between real and artificial intelligence. What does it mean to be human? In private, we are told that May is human enough to have wept when the exit poll revealed the catastrophe she brought on the Conservative party. Until then it was her party – and like all birthday girls she could cry if she wanted to.

But it isn’t her party now, and the trauma of surviving in stasis and on sufferance is causing the public Maybot to regress technologically. While she can still hear and comprehend the questions, the variety of her pre-programmed answers is even more limited. There are £14.99 string-pull talking dollies at Toys R Us with a wider range.

Whatever the enquiry – Boris, tuition fees, the election – the response sequence is the same. 1) I have been very clear about this. 2) Things are much better than you suggest: the Tories won more votes than in 2015, more people are going to university, Brexit will be great, Boris is right behind me (but as Marr pungently mused, but what’s he holding?). 3) I have listened to what the people said. And 4) Going forward, my Government is committed to building a country that works for everyone.

When some sort of positronic malfunction causes her to extemporise, it’s borderline tragic. Her reference to Labour’s sensible anticipation of a fall in sterling if it comes to power offered Marr the chance, and he calmly slotted home by wondering what’s been happening to the pound under her leadership.

And asked if it was a mistake to call that election, she replied: “Is it ever a mistake to offer people the opportunity to vote? I don’t think so.”

Corbyn doesn’t need her active help at the minute, but there it was anyway as she gave him a hand grenade to lob back at her across the Dispatch Box when the conference season is over.

Is it ever a mistake for the malfunctioning robot leader of a fractured party on the verge of all-out civil war, sustained in the mirage of power only by lobbing gold at the creationists of the DUP, to offer people the opportunity to vote? That would be my first question when PMQs resumes.

Whether she can remember this morning’s answer to that, her birthday present to a nation in urgent need of another election is that on that point – if on nothing else – she really was very clear.