Theresa May's managerial approach

Andrew Gimson has a piece in CAPX on Theresa May's failed managerialism. To my mind the argument doesn't quite work but is interesting nonetheless. 

Theresa May has discredited the managerial approach to politics: the idea that you can find your way through a difficult problem by mastering the detail and working out a sensible compromise. She thought her Brexit compromise was sensible, but it infuriated people on both sides of the argument, who reckoned it fell far short of what they wanted, and that it broke the various assurances she had given them.

Maybe so but I don't think voters say to themselves - strewth I'm fed up with all this managerialism. I certainly don't.

To my mind these two paragraphs are closer but not quite there -

Unfortunately for her, she could not impart the faintest trace of romance to her plan. The voters were right to detect that she had no emotional commitment to it. Her heart was not engaged, which made it impossible for her to engage anyone else’s heart. She was promoting her deal as a matter of duty, calculation, conscientious self-interest. For MPs and voters, that was not enough.

All this is beyond the comprehension of the managerial mind, with its distrust of the spontaneous, the unexpected, the gesture or feeling which takes everyone by surprise and makes us laugh or reduces us to tears. Brexit for most of the time is discussed in an unbearably dry, technocratic, managerial manner, as a series of pragmatic trade-offs which we have all got to be grown-up enough to accept. The present Prime Minister could never quite transcend that grimly reductive approach. The Conservatives now need to find someone who can.

The missing link here is honesty, particularly honesty about the series of pragmatic trade-offs. Voters would probably put up with a dry, technocratic, managerial manner if presented honestly and if the trade-offs were in the open. 

Yet as everyone knows, vested interests have few problems in corrupting the technical aspects and the trade-offs in any political debate. That's the core of it - dishonesty. That dry, technocratic, managerial manner cannot easily hide dishonesty in our digital world.