NOW READ DAVID LAWS ON ICE QUEEN THERESA MAYAND RANTING GOVE

Feuding Cabinet Ministers and a flouncing Cameron ...in Coalition memoirs that have rocked Westminster

TO Nick Clegg, she was the ‘Ice Queen’. Eric Pickles referred to her disparagingly as ‘Tricksy Belle of Marsham Street’ [the Home Office HQ]. Her relations with Michael Gove were, shall we say, distant. She and Chris Grayling, the Justice Secretary, fought like ‘two scorpions in a bottle’.

She was, and indeed still is, the Home Secretary, Theresa May.

I had a sneaking admiration for her, as did Nick Clegg. No one could argue she wasn’t on top of her job.

But she did not like to share the limelight with junior Ministers.

She drove Lib Dem Home Office Minister Norman Baker mad. The feeling was mutual – after he was appointed in 2013, the next day’s Cabinet meeting started a most unusual five minutes late, because Theresa May was in the Prime Minister’s office complaining: ‘How could you agree to Nick putting this man into my department? Norman Baker, for goodness sake.’

But it wasn’t only Lib Dems she fell out with. If anything, her relations with Conservatives colleagues were worse. She would frequently clash with George Osborne over immigration. She rarely got on anything but badly with Michael Gove. She and Cameron seemed to view each other with mutual suspicion.

I first met her in 2010. I was sitting in my Treasury office, overlooking St James’s Park, me in one armchair and the Home Secretary in the other, with no officials present. She looked nervous. I felt she was surprised to find herself as Home Secretary. Frankly, I didn’t expect her to last more than a couple of years. I felt she didn’t expect great longevity either. But she has proved herself a far more politically successful Home Secretary than anyone expected.

Part of her success is that she has been very focused on her job and not – usually – allowed herself to be distracted by other considerations.

She stood apart from the ‘inner circle’ of the Conservative team. She was not ‘one of the boys’, and wasn’t treated as such.

There was a distinct frostiness between her and Cameron, Osborne, Gove and their inner circle, which I never once saw melt away.

Some of the most robust Cabinet clashes I saw were between May and Osborne over her rigid attitude to economic immigration. [May was keener on cutting the number of migrants travelling to the UK in search of better jobs.] There was no love lost between the two. She could be more measured on the extremism agenda than Cameron and Gove wanted to be, and there was often an unflashy but steely common sense about the measures she pushed forward.

But in many other areas, the Home Office was a Coalition battleground. More serious than her autocratic running of her department were divisions on policy such as the Communications Data Bill, known as the ‘Snoopers’ Charter’, when civil liberties were in conflict with anti-crime and terrorism measures the security services and police wanted.

Nick Clegg met Theresa May to discuss it. It was a difficult meeting. ‘You know, I’ve grown to rather like Theresa May,’ Nick told me afterwards. ‘She’s a bit of an Ice Maiden and has no small talk what- soever – none. I have quite difficult meetings with her. Cameron once said, “She’s exactly like that with me too!” ‘She is instinctively secretive and very rigid, but you can be tough with her and she’ll go away and think it all through again.’

But the Home Office proposed few changes to the Bill and Nick Clegg let it be known he would not let it go ahead. The reaction from the Home Office was immediate and unpleasant: briefings to newspapers that ‘Clegg is the friend of paedophiles and terrorists’.

Relations between May and Clegg became acrimonious.

Matters came to a head again the following spring. Clegg would not support the Bill, however upset Theresa May was going to be. Over dinner with Cameron, he said: ‘If you think gay marriage has been bad for your party, Comms Data is gay marriage on stilts for me.’

Clegg later told Cameron by phone he still wasn’t convinced. ‘It was classic Cameron,’ Clegg told me. ‘Petulant. He got quite narky. He said Theresa May was threatening to bring in the head of MI5 to the Cabinet to speak in favour of the Bill. I just told him that was not acceptable.’

Clegg told May he would not allow the Comms Bill to proceed. Relations were now so bad the two sat next to each other in three hours of meetings and didn’t exchange a single word.