Brummie adviser helps May invoke spirit of ‘Old Joe’ Ex-grammar school boy takes top No.10 job
NEW prime minister Theresa May’s top advisers include the Brummie son of a steelworker whose political hero is Joseph Chamberlain and who thinks politicians can learn valuable lessons from the relegation of Aston Villa.
His name is Nick Timothy, an exgrammar school pupil at King Edwards VI Aston. He helped manage Mrs May’s campaign to become Conservative leader, and now he has joined her as joint chief of staff in 10 Downing Street.
Columnist Isabel Hardman, assistant editor of The Spectator said he had “great sway over her political agenda” and believed the Tories must be a party not of the rich, but of working people.
In a recent Spectator column, she said: “He feels this most keenly because he, too, was raised in a socalled ‘ordinary’ family, growing up in working-class Erdington and becoming the first member of his family to go to university.”
Mr Timothy also influenced Mrs May’s decision to launch her bid for the Conservative leadership in Birmingham. She was in the city last Monday to launch the national phase of her campaign.
It was meant to be the start of a nine-week contest to become Conservative leader, although that all changed when her opponent, Andrea Leadsom, pulled out of the race.
In her speech, Mrs May named Joseph Chamberlain, the Victorianera mayor of Birmingham, as one of her political heroes, alongside Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and reforming Tory Prime Minister Robert Peel.
Mr Timothy is the author of a book on Chamberlain, called Our Joe, in which he argues that the Birmingham politician should be a role model for the modern Conservative Party.
Paul Goodman, editor of website Conservative Home, wrote that Joseph Chamberlain’s influence was clear in Mrs May’s speech, which focused on helping lower earners and savers, and promised more intervention and planning to support industry.
He wrote: “This might be called Joe Chamberlain economics, after the radical-turned-Tory politician and Mayor of Birmingham – where she made the speech; the choice of location was no accident – who has been studied and praised on this site by our columnist and her principal aide, Nick Timothy.”
Mr Timothy was also a columnist on the Conservative Home website, telling readers on one occasion about his love of Aston Villa.
Mr Timothy wrote: “Support for a football club is about so much more than following the results of a team that plays a sport you enjoy. It is something that is passed down from grandparents and parents to children.
“It is about taking pride in your home town or city, as anybody who has been to a cup final at Wembley – with half the stadium taken up by singing Brummies and the other half taken up by noisy Liverpudlians or Mancunians or Londoners – will tell you.
“For an exile living in London like me, it is about hearing the collective Brummie accent as the Holte End, our magnificent terrace-turned-stand, sings with pride, passion and humour.
“It is about the lump in the throat I still feel every time I sing “Holte Enders in the Sky”, and think of my late Nan and Granddad.”
But Villa’s mismanagement and relegation from the premier league also illustrates the way that big businesses can be poorly managed – and the fact that “there is more to life than markets,” he wrote.