The Abuse of Power: Confronting Injustice in Public

The author, who served as British prime minister from 2016 to 2019, is remembered as a stodgy and ineffective “one nation” conservative who failed to secure a parliamentary majority in 2017, forge an agreement on Brexit, and block the rise of her erratic successor, Boris Johnson. Surprisingly, her memoir is a passionate call to defend society from privileged elites who have elevated personal over public interest—a damning and unsentimental indictment that seems almost socialist in its zeal. Narrow opportunism, she says, explains why the speaker of the House of Commons, hard-core Brexiteers, and Northern Irish politicians scotched a reasonable compromise deal on Brexit, why EU negotiators pressed their advantage, and why Johnson ultimately signed a deal that was worse for the United Kingdom. She also lambastes private-sector entities, including social media outlets and pharmaceutical companies, for failing to uphold their end of the social contract. No self-criticism follows. Instead, in the final chapter, May professes a naive faith that all this can only be solved if careerist politicians and state officials adopt an ethic of public service. This position ignores the deeper material and institutional sources of elite power and thus evades the central irony: most of the elite bad actors May criticizes in this book are core constituents of the Conservative Party that she has supported for decades.