Theresa May claims there's no such thing as Mayism. I don't know about that. What puzzles me, though, is that there don't seem to be any obvious Mayites.

To see what I mean, contrast May and Thatcher. Thatcher had two things which May seems to lack.

One is an idea of how to increase economic growth: for Thatcher, this meant smashing trades unions, deregulation, lower taxes and restoring profits to encourage investment. Whatever its merits, this was at least a vision which had some intellectual backing and keen and articulate supporters.

May, by contrast, seems to offer no such thing. At least two of her policies - hard Brexit and immigration controls - would (if delivered) depress growth. And she has little idea of how to offset this. Her infrastructure plans offer nothing much that Labour isn't, and her industrial strategy is weak. In contrast, to Thatcher, nobody is seriously suggesting May has a plan to restore growth.

Secondly, Thatcher's policies certainly benefited large client groups: businessmen who enjoyed weaker unions; property owners who saw house prices soar thanks to credit deregulation; City boys who won from financialization and lower taxes; people who bought their council houses at a discount, and so on. Thatcher gave us yuppies, garagistes and Loadsamoney.

Where are the Mayite equivalents? Which groups are going to profit from a May government? Yes, peddlers of equity release schemes might profit from people's need to buy social care; and immigration controls will encourage people smugglers. But these are probably too narrow a client base to be a successful electoral base.

Of course, May will defend the interests of a decent minority: she'll protect the rich from Labour's tax plans, and financiers from the transactions tax. But it's not clear whose interests she'll actively advance.

Here, we must distinguish between interests and preferences. May will probably satisfy the preferences of those who want a hard Brexit. But those preferences are intrinsic rather than a means to prosperity. It's not obvious which significant social group will be made rich by this.

Hence my puzzle. I've long assumed that politicians serve particular material interests, yet it's not obvious whose May is advancing.

You might reply here that the state in capitalist society has always had to fulfil two often contradictory functions: to ensure the continued accumulation of capital via "business-friendly" policies; and to legitimate the system by placating non-capitalists. Whereas Thatcher focused more upon the former, May's "red Toryism" is focusing upon the latter. She's promoting the interests of capital by buying off hostility to capitalism.

There's some truth in this. But it misses two things. One is that popular discontent arises at least in part from the long stagnation of real wages. The other is that the current crisis of capitalism is not just one of legitimacy but accumulation: prolonged low investment tells us this. To both of these real problems, May is offering little solution.

This leads me to two possible different conclusions. One possibility is that Phil is right. The Tory party, he says, is "decadent": "For decades, it has not been a suitable vehicle for the interests it's supposed to represent." It's not clear that the Tories can remain popular in the long-term if they're not offering a way of enriching some client base.

Perhaps, though, there's something else. Maybe all this reflects the befuddlement of a Marxist who's accustomed to thinking of politics in terms of material class interests, and yet the world has changed so that preferences matter more than interests and identities (such as somewheres vs anywheres) matter more than class. Whether these shifts are happening or not, and if they are whether they are long-lasting or not, are issues about which I am uncertain.

So yes, I'm puzzled.