As someone who finds Theresa May quite irritating, her US Vogue photoshoot was never going to appeal to me. So the fact that I found it grim doesn’t mean, I must grudgingly admit, that it was a mistake. My opinion doesn’t really matter here. What a self-defeating statement to find myself making in the first paragraph of a column.

So I may as well try to look at it from her point of view – summon up some empathy, a term that May herself disdained in the accompanying interview as “a very ‘today’ word”. She’s not completely fashion mad then. She prefers to say “understanding”. Thus the social worker becomes the biologist: while we may empathise with our fellow humans, we merely understand the life cycle of the cockroach.

I’m not saying she’s ugly. Or attractive. I’m trying not to form any opinion on that because I don’t think it’s fair

Whoops, I’ve started implying she’s horrible again. Which is unfair, because I don’t know her. She just conjures up negative associations for me – which is partly sexism and partly whatever you’d call prejudice against people who’ve been home secretary – home-ophobia? Maybe, if I wasn’t a sexist home-ophobe who can’t handle strong women or hugely increased powers of state surveillance, I’d like her. Or at least have an open mind, so that when I saw a photo of her reclining in a drawing room with the wind in her hair (I assume Mr May was just out of frame, recovering from lunch), I wouldn’t find it so repellent.

I’m not saying she’s ugly. Or attractive. I’m trying not to form any opinion on that because I don’t think it’s fair – I never asked myself whether John Major or Tony Blair were attractive. It’s that prejudice of mine again: somehow I can’t discuss Jacqui Smith or Kenneth Baker or Willie Whitelaw without criticising their hair and thinking about how the light caught their skin when they addressed the Police Federation conference.

So I admit I sneered when I saw those photos of May looking slightly better than normal — which is in itself perfectly fine – which is in itself none of my business. I thought “Winston Churchill never did a photoshoot for Vogue!” In precisely those words and I’m not proud of it. I hadn’t even checked he didn’t (I have now). It wasn’t “Clement Attlee never did a photoshoot for Vogue!”, which would have felt more liberal, or “the 14th Earl of Derby never did a photoshoot for Vogue!”, which would have been more interesting. I went straight to the Churchill comparison like a boring Tory would, like the “wilfully unimaginative” (Vogue, 2017) Theresa May would if she wanted to slag off anyone apart from herself.

Incidentally, I’ve heard that Apple is working on a politics app that slags off political opponents for you. It basically alternates saying “Winston Churchill wouldn’t do that!” and “That’s just like the Nazis!”, and after years stuck in development, it’s finally proving effective in real-life debate – not because of any design improvements, it’s just the way the world is going.

Illustration by David Foldvari.

I also didn’t like the photoshoot’s surrounding buzz. Ooh, Annie Leibovitz has photographed the prime minister! What a huge deal! Someone must have obtained both Annie Leibovitz’s fee and a time at which she and Theresa May were available – how overpoweringly noteworthy!

I realise I’m failing to show respect for the fact that we’re dealing with a great artist here. I refer, of course, to whoever handles Annie Leibovitz’s PR. A genius of the field.

I’m cross with the media for making me have heard of Annie Leibovitz. I begrudge the brain space – I may need it to retain bladder control in my dotage. It was when she photographed the Queen – which I thought was Lord Snowdon’s job, the only photographer I had then heard of, which, frankly, seemed like enough. But oh no, I needed to have heard of a whole second photographer! Annie Leibovitz?! Come on, Mitchell! Don’t you know she was the penultimate person to shoot John Lennon?!

This isn’t composing operas or designing cathedrals. It’s something you can do for yourself in a booth. I reckon it’s silly to get too hung up about things like that – I suppose that’s why I’ve never been much of a lothario.

I’m sounding like I hate Annie Leibovitz, and I don’t. I’ve got nothing against her except envy. In her job, incredibly famous people bust a gut to look their best, she takes a snap and the world rejoices at another Annie Leibovitz photo of a famous person looking their best. Nice work if you can get it – and I bet she hasn’t had to spend a single night lurking in Jordan’s front garden.

Annie Leibovitz: ‘Nice work if you can get it…’ Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex/Shutterstock

But, from May’s point of view, my whingeing is irrelevant. My good opinion is unobtainable at a price she’s willing to pay. She’d need to resign, saying: “I can’t lead the country through Brexit – I think Brexit’s the wrong thing to do. It would be as unethical for me to take charge of it as for a surgeon to perform an operation she considered detrimental to a patient’s health. Even David Cameron, who’d previously shown zero evidence of any vestige of conscience, thought it immoral to remain prime minister under these circumstances, so I’d better go too.” I don’t think she’s up for that. And, if I’m honest, I doubt it would make her happy.

She probably wanted to show “who she really is”. It’s the prevailing wisdom of modern politics that that’s vital for a leader and, having avoided either a general or a leadership election and their attendant campaigns, May hasn’t had much of an opportunity. Tony Blair was the master of this. He showed us the capable, intelligent, slightly awkward, professional man he was back then.

But what we actually need to know is who they want to be. That’s what Blair has since revealed, emerging from his chrysalis of respectability as a terrifying, perma-tanned money moth. Margaret Thatcher was genuinely a hard-working, lower middle-class wife and mother, but she wanted to rule the universe. Meanwhile John Major yearned only to watch cricket and diddle Edwina Currie on the side. We all know, in our hearts, which is most trustworthy.

Theresa May is an ambitious and authoritarian politician. But who does she want to be? On Desert Island Discs, she chose a lifetime subscription to Vogue as her luxury. So she either loves Vogue or wants people to think so. Christ. And now, at her first opportunity, she’s in it – dressed up, coiffured, staring unflinchingly at an eminent lens. We’d be safer with someone who looks idiotic eating a sandwich.