It’s not just the new hairstyle. Mrs May is glowing. For the first time, she’s really enjoying power

MOST women will know the scene in the film When Harry Met Sally, in which Meg Ryan simulates physical pleasure. Whereupon an older broad on an adjoining table turns to the waiter and says huskily: ‘I’ll have what she’s having.’

Without wishing to be indelicate about our Prime Minister, the same thought must have been racing through the minds of her political rivals this week as they watched her seize the agenda and announce the June 8 General Election.

Whatever Theresa May is on — ginseng tea, a new exercise regime or simply the adrenaline of executive command — it is doing her wonders.

With one bound she has confounded her enemies, electrified her supporters and left the Establishment open mouthed with astonishment.

Confidence

Mrs May’s manner and her political prospects have been transformed. In the Commons yesterday she threw back her head with delight, booted Jeremy Corbyn out of the ground and won a hefty vote of approval for her election plan.

She radiated purpose and confidence. It was almost as if a veil had been lifted — which, in terms of political strategy, it has. Just a few days ago, the narrowing horizon presented Mrs May with numerous problems. Now, thanks to her bold gambit, she has a chance to become a powerful PM with her own mandate.

If she can win the coming election with room to spare, she will be in a far better position to clinch a good deal for the whole country from the Brexit talks than if she had just tried to stagger on with a diminishing majority.

Mrs May has given voters a scintillating choice to determine who is really in charge of this country: you, the people, or your parliamentary elite.

‘ The country is coming together, but Westminster is not,’ she said on Tuesday after bounding out of the door of 10 Downing Street to announce she was going to the polls.

At this time of political upheaval, she suggested, naysayers were trying to block the national interest.

The Mail’s front page yesterday called those gripers, not least in the unelected House of Lords, ‘saboteurs’ for their plots to frustrate a clean Brexit. The Left and its friends in the BBC threw up their hands in horror, suggesting it was anti- democratic to use such a word.

What rot! Sabotage is the game these people have been playing. They were trying to stymie the biggest national plebiscite ever held. The referendum was a non-parliamentary vote, yet parliamentarians took it upon themselves to frustrate its outcome.

Now Mrs May has called the bluff of the anti-Brexit caterwaulers — the Cleggs, Blairs, Heseltines and so forth — who for a year have wheedled and moaned and manoeuvred.

They wanted a fight? Very well, she’s on for it. Roll your sleeves, gentlemen. The lady is ready for you and her fingernails are like razor blades.

Theresa May’s great merit, as a former Remain supporter, has been to accept that Brexit really must mean Brexit. As opinion polls have repeatedly and increasingly shown, we want the Government to be allowed to get on with it.

That will be a major theme of the coming election campaign, and it is likely to appeal not just to Leave voters but also to millions of patriotic former Remain supporters, who quite properly want their Government to be strong in coming negotiations with Brussels.

Then there is the character of the Prime Minister. Mrs May is not a natural radical. After her long stint at the Home Office she won a well-earned reputation for stolidity: Theresa the Cautious Brick.

But we should not be altogether surprised at this week’s bombshell. As she showed in 2012 when she saved autistic British computer hacker Gary McKinnon from extradition to the U.S., she is not one to be bossed about by the ‘business as usual’ brigade. She took that decision without asking David Cameron, and in clear defiance of the Obama White House.

During the referendum campaign she declined to join the shroud-waving of Osborne’s ‘Project Fear’. Messrs Cameron and Osborne accused her of being ‘ submarine May’, disappearing from view at the vital moment.

But with good reason, she simply could not abide their illjudged, doom- mongering hyperbole and felt it demeaned our politics.

Some childish types had taken to calling her ‘Theresa Maybe’, hoping to create an impression she was a ditherer. And at the weekend there were rumours in the Press she was physically not up to the job.

Those comment jockeys could not have been more wrong. Mrs May is a great deal feistier than that, and fitter.

All that walking in Snowdonia, where she made her election decision while on a short break with her husband Philip, has left her looking full of beans.

This is a leader in full sail. It is hard to believe, amid the strains of high office, she lives with diabetes.

Champion

The fact is that the Theresa May of recent months has looked increasingly comfortable in her own skin.

The hairdo has changed, with a power bob unveiled for her announcement on Tuesday. It’s shorter, more modern, a great improvement on the style she wore at the start of the Coalition years.

And she has been seen chuckling more, relaxing more, putting in a stint as a fun run marshal and happily posing for selfies with the public.

When she first became PM, was she overwhelmed by the workload? This is a woman who likes to feel on top of her briefings, but even her voracious appetite for paperwork was challenged by the demands of No 10.

Last autumn she succumbed to a series of heavy colds. But all that changed at the start of the year. Perhaps she found a routine that suited her. Though happily married, perhaps she was enjoying the weekly ministrations of her handsome personal trainer, Lee Carnaby. And perhaps she saw Brexit could mark her down as a truly important premier.

There is one other thing. Prime ministers who come to power mid-term never quite feel authentic until they have won a General Election in their own right. If she can do it in June she will, at last, be mistress of all she surveys, a genuine champion rather than a PM who came to power by internal machinations.

And she will have buried the memory of having been subordinate to the Bullingdon Boys, Cameron and Osborne.

Stateswoman

For all that, she thought long about this week’s announcement. No prime minister lightly imperils her grip on power, no matter how promising the opinion polls, and no matter how useless the Opposition.

Like her cricket hero Geoffrey Boycott, she does not rush her shots, but having examined the facts she found they were irrefutable.

Cameron’s 2015 majority was not big enough for the political wallop she will need to extract maximum advantage from Brexit trade renegotiations.

If she had not seized this moment, the very stability she embodies, and that our country will need in the coming years, would have been placed in danger by silly politicking in Westminster.

So Mrs May has placed the national interest over her natural antipathy for melodrama. If she can win a decent majority, she will be able to overcome the anti-democratic resistance of the Lords, too.

The pro- EU centre- Left thought she would never be so bold. How wrong they were.

After these few months in the highest office, she has already developed the manner of a stateswoman entirely in command of her brief.

If she can win at the polls comfortably, she will be able to seize tremendous gains from Europe — and give the Westminster fleapit an invigorating squirt of insecticide.

Has she taken a risk? Yes. But not calling this snap election would have been even more dangerous.