Delivering a Brexit Deal to the British People: Theresa May as a Reluctant Populist

Abstract

Abstract There is widespread agreement that the so-called ‘Brexit’ – the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union – is a fundamentally populist project. However, the language of the public face of this project, Prime Minister Theresa May, has not, so far, been studied with respect to populist speech patterns. This paper presents a series of quantitative case studies aimed at closing this research gap. The first study attempts to identify evidence of populist speech patterns by means of a keyword analysis, the second study looks at the phrase the (British) people, the third study at the phrase the will of the people, and the fourth at references to the past and the future. While these are based on a priori hypotheses about populist speech patterns, a fifth case study looks at the verb deliver and the noun deal, which are inductively identified as typical of May’s statements concerning Brexit, and shows how they allow May to construct a populist discourse without taking the role of the populist. All case studies are based on a dedicated corpus of almost 270,000 tokens consisting of speeches and other spoken and written statements by Theresa May.