Welcome to a certain kind of hell
So here it is, the thing that finally sends you over the edge and into the vice-like grip of complete and total insanity: Theresa May dancing.
Theresa May trying to dance, an ancient art, an almost universal form of expression, is like an anchor trying to float, or a bulldog attempting to contour its face with makeup. It just shouldn’t happen. It just can’t happen. Again, it just shouldn’t happen. Fundamentally, it just goes against the very nature of the thing: an anchor’s dead weight, a bulldog’s fantastic lumpy face, Theresa May’s vacuous soul.
Theresa May is a person, who, if you looked at her, and knew a bit about her (her two-decade-long career as a Conservative politician, that she studied Geography at the University of Oxford, that her father was a Vicar) you could pretty much unequivocally state that she couldn’t dance.
You could, comfortably, come to the conclusion that the PM currently claiming a “no-deal Brexit wouldn’t be the end of the world” wouldn’t be able to move with even the faintest hint of grace or fluidity.
And you’d be right. And you know you’d be right without her even having to dance. Which is fine. Nobody gets hurt that way. Nobody has to suffer through… this. Whatever the fuck this actually is.
Brace yourselves.
Theresa May dances with school children during her South Africa visithttps://t.co/hW8S23GsNd pic.twitter.com/nQNXquroKH
— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) August 28, 2018
Rhythm appears to be as strange and as foreign a concept to poor Theresa as the “strong and stable” leadership she promised. She bops with all the clunky energy of one of those Japanese robots that walks like it is attempting to lunge across the surface of the moon, or some dry spaghetti.
And the choice of moves: astonishing. Simply astonishing. She ventures straight from a weird side-to-side sway, clicking her fingers as she goes, straight into a full yer Da at a wedding reception version of the running man, swinging her arms forward and back with all the enthusiasm of the T-1000 Terminator in T2: Judgement Day and grinning manically at the small children in front of her – who are actually having a good time and dancing with some actual real joy in their bones – completely oblivious to the fact that she now looks as utterly frightening as the T-1000 Terminator in T2: Judgement Day.
Maybe this is what happens, the result of running through too many fields of wheat as a child, and now this is simply the only way her body can move now, as though rigidly pushing its way through the maze of the tall grass and the stems of the cereal grain.
I wonder what she thinks, as she looks to the camera, arms driving like pistons. Because what it looks like it, what it looks like she is actually thinking is:
“This will be great. This will be really great. You look good Theresa. Completely natural. Completely in your element. You go girl. Â The public will love this. They will absolutely love it. There is nothing the public responds better to that a completely out of touch establishment politician venturing somewhere they deem exotic (translation: anywhere bereft of upper-class white people) and attempting to forcibly show how down-to-earth they actually are by clumsily attempting to integrate with the local people. This will make everyone forget about Brexit. You’ve nailed it. You’ve absolutely smashed it.”
And she’s right, in a way, because it’s hard to think about anything else, anything else at all, after watching her shimmy-dance-walk into a large crowd of helpless South African children like she’s lurching about a grimy underground nightclub at last orders.
Watch, if you must, as she dances across the pavement with all the freedom of movement of a red-blazered scarecrow strapped to a freshly ironed ironing board attempting to walk up an escalator for the very first time.
[WATCH]: Prime Minister #TheresaMay at ID Mkhize Senior Secondary in Gugulethu, Cape Town. @SABCNewsOnline @SAgovnews @KhayaJames @UbuntuRadioZA @PresidencyZA @DBE_SA pic.twitter.com/lanmSeKWAS
— DIRCO South Africa (@DIRCO_ZA) August 28, 2018
This is where we are now with political figures in our country, as a no-deal Brexit’s lengthy shadow continues to loom over us like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.
But, don’t worry, Boris will bring out the tea, and Theresa will have a bop, and that’s enough, because that’s all they can do.
Still, at least now we know for sure that Theresa May can’t dance. At least we have that knowledge well and truly in the memory bank now.
