Put your head down and get to work, Theresa Mays style
STEVEN ERLANGER
Her beloved father, an Anglican vicar, died in a car crash when she was 25, after she had been married only a year, and her mother, who had multiple sclerosis, died a few months later. For Theresa May, a cherished only child, the shock was devastating.
It brought her even closer to her husband, Philip, two years younger, whom she had met at Oxford, at a Conservative Party disco. They bonded over cricket and silly university debates, like the one where Philip induced her to speak for the motion That sex is good but success is better.
Both became bankers, and Ms. May threw herself into the Conservative politics that had entranced her since the age of 12, when she liked to argue with her father and he asked her, in order to maintain neutrality in his parish, not to parade her Tory colors in public.
Politics captured me, Ms. May said in 2014. That sounds terribly trite, she said, but I wanted to make a difference, I wanted to be part of the debate.
On Wednesday, Ms. May, 59, became Britains prime minister, the last adult standing after other senior members of her party the clever younger men from Britains elite schools, like her predecessor, David Cameron schemed each other out of contention.
For Ms. May, only Britains second female prime minister, it is a job she never publicly acknowledged wanting, until Mr. Cameron, bluff and self-confident, pushed his luck once too often, lost the referendum on keeping Britain in the European Union and quit.
Ms. May, who had been home secretary, is considered a safe pair of hands, not flashy and even dull, who seems to be a candidate of continuity. But the countrys dire circumstances may demand more. And Ms. May, a traditional economic and social conservative in many respects, has signaled a desire to give her party a new focus on the need to build a fairer society.
With Britain deeply divided over its decision to leave the European Union, its place in the world in flux, its unity threatened by calls for Scottish independence and its economy at risk, the times may require that Ms. May be both steady and bold. Her six-year tenure at the Home Office showed her to be a tough operator and put her in charge of a number of flash-point issues. She demanded police reforms to reduce racial profiling. She helped push through surveillance policies that had to balance fears of terrorism against civil liberties and confronted public pressure to reduce immigration, failing to meet government targets for doing so. If sometimes at odds with Mr. Camerons inner circle she was a quiet critic of the governments budget austerity she nonetheless built a reputation as smart and competent.
Damian Green, who worked for her as Home Office minister until 2014, said that Theresa doesnt do verbiage, doesnt do speeches for the sake of making speeches. One of her virtues is that when she says something today she means it tomorrow.
But she will have to bind a badly torn party in which she has won esteem but few close friends. She will also have to juggle competing priorities in negotiating the withdrawal from the European Union under the watchful eye of Brexit supporters who remain wary of her commitment to their cause.
Even though she publicly if tepidly supported remaining in Europe out of loyalty to Mr. Cameron, saying it would be best for the nations security, at heart she is a Euroskeptic, said Catherine Meyer, a former treasurer of the Conservative Party and a friend of the Mays. When she says Brexit means out, she means it.
While respected within the European Union as a tough and unpretentious negotiator, Ms. May will have to find the right balance between more controls on immigration that the voters demanded and at least partial access, if she can manage it, to the single market of the European Union.
Friends say that her early religious upbringing she is an Anglican but went to a Roman Catholic school has given Ms. May a moral base, a steady personality and a feeling for the disadvantaged. Her background has shaped her into somebody who is not going to feel sorry for herself or blame others for her mistakes, and who finds solace in moving forward, not to sit but to fight, said Ms. Meyer, who worked with Ms. May on a charity for abducted children.
A young woman who hunched her shoulders at school to seem less tall has grown into a proud master of her responsibilities. She lives for her work and her husband, a well-off investment banker, and their time together in their neat house in Sonning-on-Thames, in Berkshire, in the heart of her Maidenhead constituency, a village she shares with better-known types like the guitarist Jimmy Page and George and Amal Clooney. She likes to cook and owns more than 100 cookbooks, and will likely be glad that the Camerons took the heat for remodeling the ancient kitchen at 10 Downing Street.
Mr. Cameron valued her workaholic talents, naming her Home Office secretary, one of the four senior cabinet posts, only the second woman to hold the job. Wary of her quiet ambition and wanting to protect his own favorite, George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, he never promoted her further. But he did not demote her, either, even as she failed to deliver on one of the governments key pledges, to curb immigration. She was famous for fighting her corner, knowing her subject and keeping clear of the Cameron chumocracy.
Ms. May is polite but not chummy, works late and does not hang around Parliaments bars. Her lack of a set of friends was considered one of her great liabilities in the race to succeed Mr. Cameron, said Crispin Blunt, a Conservative member of Parliament who is one of her supporters. There wasnt an army of mates for her, he said, but it allows her now to make appointments to her government on the basis of her own priorities and assessments.
In government, sometimes its difficult to be a woman surrounded by lots of men, said Ms. Meyer. Like Margaret Thatcher, she likes the company of men, but shes capable of putting her fist down.
Ms. May was co-founder in 2005 of a group called Women2Win, to elect more women to Parliament and then nurture them, something that Mrs. Thatcher, the first woman to lead Britain, was often criticized for failing to do.
In office, Ms. May has been rigorous, largely sticking to her brief, which she knew in depth, and not often consulting cabinet colleagues. One former minister, Kenneth Clarke, called her a bloody difficult woman, a description she embraced. She tends to work alone or with a small number of aides, like Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy, and has a tendency to micromanage, a senior civil servant said, asking anonymity.
After two failed attempts, she was elected to Parliament in 1997. In 2002, when chosen to chair the party, Ms. May gave a speech about the need to reach out to the less fortunate. Our base is too narrow and so, occasionally, are our sympathies, she said. You know what some people call us? The nasty party. I know thats unfair, you know thats unfair, but its the people out there that we have to convince.
In 2014, she again earned attention for taking on the powerful police union, the Police Federation, limiting stop and search because of racial bias and imposing elected oversight commissions on the police. To a stunned conference of police, she said: The federation was created by an act of Parliament and it can be reformed by an act of Parliament. If you do not change of your own accord we will impose change on you.
Among her most controversial acts was helping to push through a so-called snoopers charter, giving the police and security services new powers in a world of digital communications and terrorism. After criticism that the measure impinged too much on civil liberties and individual rights, she agreed to some changes.
Ms. May has been compared to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany both daughters of Protestant clergymen, both with quiet, private husbands, both without children, both hardworking and rather distant. Ms. May clearly sees the similarities, including being underestimated by men.
If you look at somebody like Angela Merkel and think of what shes actually achieved, you know, there are still people who dont rate her, are a bit dismissive, perhaps because of the way she looks and dresses, Ms. May said in a 2012 interview with the Daily Telegraph. What matters is, what has she actually done? And, when you look at her abilities in terms of negotiation, and steering Germany through a difficult time, then hats off to her.
She has only rarely spoken publicly about her personal life, though it briefly became a campaign issue when one of her challengers, Angela Leadsom, seemed to suggest that she had a greater stake in Britains future because she has children and Ms. May does not.
You look at families all the time and you see there is something there that you dont have, Ms. May said in the 2012 interview with The Daily Telegraph, when asked about not having children. You accept the hand life deals you.
Ms. May took the same attitude to her diagnosis of diabetes, for which she said she gave herself four injections a day. Just get on and deal with it, she said.
She has made a calculated effort to show some inner life and spark by her choice of clothes, especially her kitten-heeled animal-print shoes, which the British press chronicles avidly. You can be clever and like clothes, she has said. One of the challenges for women in politics is to be ourselves.
When asked on Desert Island Discs what single novel she wanted as a castaway, she answered, Pride and Prejudice. And her single luxury? A lifetime subscription to Vogue.
The New York Times
