The making of a Prime Minister
The churchgoing, grammar school-educated daughter of a vicar, Theresa May could hardly be more different to her predecessor at No. 10. Yet their lives have parallels, says David Runciman in his review of a new biography of the PM
Theresa May grew up in a Cotswolds village called Church Enstone, where her father was vicar for much of the 1960s. The vicarage is within five miles of what became David Cameron’s constituency home in Witney, and is roughly the same distance from what is now Soho Farmhouse, a little piece of the metropolis that is a haven for the Chipping Norton set. Both of her grandmothers had been in service. In 2011, May described the milieu she grew up in, as a grammar school girl in the late 1960s – a vanished world of sherbert fountains, stodgy puddings and Corona, of Tommy Steele and Z Cars, a world of which Cameron would have been ignorant, growing up a decade later with The Smiths and Smash Hits.
It was at school that she became interested in politics, and by the time she was in the sixth form, she was confident enough to announce that she intended to become Britain’s first woman prime minister. At Eton, Cameron made it clear that he wanted to be prime minister one day too. In his case, the ambition seemed presumptuous but plausible. May’s ambition struck her contemporaries as nothing more than quaint. When Thatcher beat her to it in 1979, May was working as a junior analyst at the Bank of England and is reported to have been seriously aggrieved.
Like Cameron, May went to Oxford, but unlike the politically ambitious boys who gravitated towards PPE, she chose to read geography. She did seek to make her mark in the Union and gained a reputation as a competent speaker. But she didn’t rise in Union politics and had to make do with the presidency of Oxford’s second debating club, the Edmund Burke Society, whose set-piece occasions were meant to be more light-hearted. She presided with a meat tenderiser in place of a gavel; the motions she chose for debate included “That this House thanks Heaven for little girls”. May’s Oxford wasn’t Cameron’s. She went to church every Sunday. She didn’t drink much, and couldn’t afford to. Her idea of a good time was watching The Goodies, which as one of her university friends puts it, “was our sense of humour”.
Cameron took his PPE degree and had a brief career in PR, biding his time until a safe seat became available. May went to work at the Bank of England then on to the City. She also got stuck in to local politics, becoming a Tory councillor in the diverse borough of Merton. Cameron’s path to Parliament was the one that would become conventional for his generation: special adviser, then a bit
of media work, all eased by the lubricant of personal connections. May took the old-fashioned route. She lost two campaigns in safe Labour seats before securing the nomination for the winnable constituency of Maidenhead. Strikingly, in the campaigns she lost, she declined to take part in competitive hustings against her opponents, choosing instead to focus on canvassing. It remains her preferred way of doing politics.
May won the nomination for Maidenhead ahead of 300 other applicants, among them the 29-yearold Cameron, chancing his luck. This is one of the few occasions before late last year when he would have noticed her without her necessarily noticing him. Cameron didn’t even make the shortlist. She was 40 when she became an MP at the 1997 election. At the same time, Cameron fought, and lost, the seat of Stafford, which the Tories had been hoping to hold. By that point May had been married to Philip, whom she met at Oxford, for close on 20 years. They had no children, something she has revealed was not a matter of choice. Both her parents died when she was in her early 20s, her father in a car crash and her mother of multiple sclerosis a few months later. It had been, for want of a better word, a struggle. But she got there.
Blair’s landslide had left Tory numbers vastly depleted and talent thin on the ground. Women were barely represented – there were 13 female Tory MPS, compared with more than 100 on the Labour benches. Still, May wasn’t favoured by circumstance. Her talents were acknowledged but they were also pigeonholed: she was seen as a hard worker, a dogged campaigner. She was marked down as suited for middle-ranking jobs that required tenacity rather than flair. William Hague promoted her to shadow secretary of state for education, a high-profile position for a newcomer, but also traditionally a department the Tories felt suited a female touch. The fact that Thatcher had been there before her didn’t mean the Tory high command was thinking of May as a future leader. It meant it was thinking of her as another woman.
May got an opportunity to escape this straitjacket when Iain Duncan Smith made her party chairman in 2002, a decision that was seen at the time as smacking of desperation. She took advantage of the profile the role gave her to do two things that have helped shape her image ever since. At her first party conference as chairman, she wore a pair of leopard-print kitten heels. And in her speech, she told the Tories some home truths. “You know what some people call us? The nasty party.” Now
“May’s Oxford wasn’t Cameron’s. She went to church on Sundays, didn’t drink much, and her idea of a good time was watching The Goodies”
that she is PM, both moves look like essential steps on her path to the top. Back then, they served to reinforce rather than to overturn the doubts many Tories had about her. Her shoe choice confirmed the view of the sceptics that she was, in Tory-speak, “a colour supplement politician”, while her blunt address struck her colleagues as giving Labour another stick to beat them with. A year later, IDS’S successor, Michael Howard, restored her to the ranks of heavy lifters rather than heavy hitters, making her shadow secretary of state for transport.
In 2004, two members of the 2001 intake, Cameron and George Osborne, joined her in the shadow cabinet. Both quickly established themselves as part of the leader’s inner circle, from which she was excluded. In three years, and seemingly without having to do much more than show up, Cameron had got closer to the summit than May had in seven. She resented it. She may also have resented the fact that Witney was looking a safer bet than Maidenhead, which had become a target for the resurgent Lib Dems. May had to take time out to pound the streets. Meanwhile, Cameron had his feet up awaiting his moment.
When Howard resigned as leader following his general election defeat in 2005, May intended to stand to succeed him. She trailed the idea; she sounded out her colleagues; she prepared policy positions that went beyond her familiar briefs. Not only did Cameron beat her to it, he didn’t even notice she was putting herself forward. She found that her experience and competence counted for little with her fellow MPS. It seems she was only able to secure the backing of a handful of them, and in the end she didn’t even announce her candidacy formally. Cameron saw off his main rivals (Kenneth Clarke and David Davis) and then offered May a job, as shadow leader of the House, which confirmed her place somewhere in the middle of the pecking order. She was good at it – it suited her organisational abilities – but she was done little good by it.
Meanwhile, almost without noticing where they had come from, Cameron started to adopt positions for which May had diligently prepared the ground. What else was his modernising agenda other than an attempt to lay to rest the “nasty party” tag? After her aborted leadership bid, May started an organisation called Women2win, to redress the massive gender imbalance in the parliamentary party. Cameron folded it into his A-list strategy, which recommended priority candidates for parliamentary seats. In 2002, May had come up with the idea of “free schools”. Cameron and his shadow education secretary, Michael Gove, claimed the idea as their own. May got her one big stroke of luck in 2010, with the formation of the coalition. Had Cameron won a majority, she might well have remained where she was. But she was blessed by the fact that the Lib Dems were as bad as the Tories at promoting women. The negotiating teams for both coalition partners were all-male affairs, and the boys suddenly noticed that they needed a woman for a top job. So May was offered the post of Home Secretary. Normally inscrutable after years of disappointment, she was visibly flabbergasted.
In post, she soon developed a distinctive governing style. In the words of Eric Pickles, one of her Cabinet colleagues, she is not a “transactional” politician. She takes a position – often after much agonising – and then sticks to it, seeing it as a matter of principle that she delivers on what she has committed to. This doesn’t mean that she is a conviction politician. Many of the positions she adopts are ones she has inherited, seeing no option but to make good on other people’s promises. This has often brought her into conflict with the politicians from whom she inherited these policies. By making fixed what they regarded as lines in the sand, she drove some of them mad.
Her time in the coalition was remarkable for the number of bitter disputes she had with fellow ministers. She came into a department that was pre-committed by the Tory manifesto to bringing annual immigration down to “the tens of thousands”. Her colleagues, including Cameron, didn’t seem to have thought about whether this was a realistic target, and assumed that if it wasn’t, it would have to be fudged. May had no intention of fudging it, to the consternation of the people who had landed her with the task. It is far from clear she believed it was good policy. That wasn’t the issue. It was now her policy and she’d see it through. In 2011, this brought her into conflict with Clarke, who mocked her speech in which she’d laid into the Human Rights Act by raising the probably apocryphal case of “the illegal immigrant who cannot be deported because he had a pet cat”. She never forgave him.
In 2012 Osborne gave her a withering rebuke at Cabinet over the case of a Chinese businessman he had been cultivating who had been strip-searched at Heathrow before getting on a flight back to China. In response, May simply sat and stared. “She couldn’t stand him after that,” a colleague told May’s biographer, Rosa Prince. Her worst feud was with Michael Gove. This had its origins in an incident when Gove had sounded off on a Cabinet awayday about a Home Office policy that he had come to see as inadequate, the Gang Task Force. It was something May had adopted at his suggestion. Now he was telling her it was a waste time of time. She was lumbered with it, and was being accused of being inflexible and unimaginative as a result.
Today, two things about this period are starkly apparent. First, her approach to Brexit is simply a continuation of the same pattern. She inherited Brexit. She will deliver it, unlike the supposed big thinkers who conjured it up in the first place. (Unnervingly, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that her embrace of a hard Brexit, prioritising the control of immigration, is her way of finally completing her Home Office task.) The other thing is how little her former colleagues appear to have appreciated that for her, politics is all about seeing things through.
Within 20 minutes of her arrival in No. 10, May had summoned Osborne to sack him. Accounts of this meeting differ. What is clear is that he had little idea how much she loathed him. He’d thought that their disputes were just part of the cut and thrust of high politics, and easily put behind them. That’s precisely what she loathed about him. She hates the idea that politics is just a game, which is what she suspects the Cameroons have always believed. She dispatched Gove with equal relish. Many were surprised when she made Boris Johnson Foreign Secretary, given that they too had previously clashed over his attempt to usurp her authority by buying three water cannon, to keep public order in London. The difference is, he never tried to put her in her place. The public tends to see Johnson as the ultimate clown politician. For her, Cameron, Osborne and Gove were fundamentally unserious, because they made promises they couldn’t keep.
“She hates the idea that politics is just a game, which is what she suspects the Cameroons have always believed”