Theresa May as PM during COVID-19

[pragmaticidealist]

Theresa May is, for whatever reason, still PM now. Perhaps she led the Tories to an increased majority in the 2017 snap election.

How would she be handling the present pandemic? Her instincts are known to be quite authoritarian. Would she have taken a more hard-line approach from the outset, perhaps something along the lines of that of Macron?

[johnloony]

If anything I think she would have dithered longer, and been less flexible in adapting policy to change according to the new advice. The government's response to the pandemic would have been slower.

[AdminSTB]

Never mind Theresa, what would Margaret Thatcher have done if this had happened in the Eighties?

[mondialito]

I have been thinking about this a lot. I can't help but think that she would actually handled this a lot better than she handled Brexit.

Consider this. May is a famously inflexible character and is often sticks to a course once she has set on it. When handling an issue like Brexit, where there were multiple options with different priorities to choose from, someone like that was always going to upset people and fail to bring over enough people to her way of thinking. This is where, in retrospect, Boris Johnson probably would have been the better PM for taking the UK out of the EU.

Coronavirus is a different kettle of fish. This is a crisis, not a policy choice (or more accurately not a crisis borne out of policy choice, but I digress) and thus decisions made will mostly be reactive in nature, the number of options available for reacting are small and all options have the aim of containing the virus and reducing fatalities.

In this scenario, at least in the early weeks of the virus being in the UK, May would have made and communicated policy choices clearly without the initial lack of clarity which had clouded Johnson's response. This may have reduced the mass congregating last weekend, mass panic buying the weekend before and made clear to employers that they must keep employees at home wherever possible. I think people are feeling more confident in the Government's handling of Coronavirus now, but initial few weeks were still crucial for setting the tone.

[LDCaerdydd]

Mar 27, 2020 20:59:20 GMT AdminSTB said:

Never mind Theresa, what would Margaret Thatcher have done if this had happened in the Eighties?

As I think has been said Thatcher was a scientist and would have listened to the experts.

The AIDS awareness campaign in the 1980s is probably a good example of something that needed to be done but many would have fathered ignore/brush under the carpet.

[trekett]

Britain would likely be putting GPS satellites into orbit.

[pericles]

She kept on arguing against some of the restrictions, and didn't even support the November lockdown, so maybe she'd have been even worse than Boris Johnson.

[Defenestrated Fipplebox]

Sept 2, 2021 3:58:46 GMT pericles said:

She kept on arguing against some of the restrictions, and didn't even support the November lockdown, so maybe she'd have been even worse than Boris Johnson.

Or better depending on your point of view.