Ex-UK PM recounts her sticky tape moment

Dubai, Feb. 17: Former British Prime Minister Theresa May said on Monday that early on in her political career, she vowed never to think that being a woman held her back.

“Don’t think that you don’t get something because you’re a woman,” she told an audience of mostly women at the Global Women’s Forum Dubai.

Still, there were times when being a woman head of state was — well, sticky. May recounted one such moment.

She was on a British Air Force flight, heading to a dinner and having to change into evening attire. There were no changing facilities on board but the staff told her not to worry.

“They took me up into the cockpit, with two pilots there, and I’m thinking ‘really’,” she said.

“A chap comes along with sticky tape and a sheet, and he sticks it up behind the pilots and says: ‘There you go, you can change behind that’,” she said, to laughter and applause from the audience.

May, who became the second female British prime minister in 2016, after Margaret Thatcher, was speaking on stage with the United Arab Emirates ambassador to the United Nations, Lana Nusseibeh.

Nusseibeh shared her own “embarrassing” anecdote, saying that once while trying to keep up with the UAE’s foreign minister on the streets of New York, she got her heel stuck in a gutter and it broke off.

She did her best to keep up. “Men, frankly, don’t run in heels,” Nusseibeh said.

May also spoke about a type of boys-club culture that existed when she first entered the House of Commons as a member of Parliament in the late 1990s, with “a huge emphasis on the men sort of drinking together and getting together into groups.”

“Some of the women felt they had to join that, and I didn’t,”

May said. “I wanted to do it the way I wanted to do it. So, I did it my way. I was myself and, hey, I was prime minister.”

May stepped down as Conservative leader last year, leaving behind a legacy.