Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. Tim Shipman
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that brought them to that moment four minutes before ten has many tributaries. The first came in a geography tutorial meeting at Oxford University in the mid-1970s when the young Theresa Brasier turned to a fellow student, Alicia Collinson, and first expressed a desire to become prime minister. Collinson was already the girlfriend of another future cabinet minister, Damian Green, and the two students spent their university years in a social circle around the Conservative Association and the Oxford Union which included others who would find future fame in Westminster: Alan Duncan, Michael Crick and Philip Hammond. Brasier’s most significant meeting in those years – famously at the instigation of Benazir Bhutto, the future leader of Pakistan – was with Philip May, a president of the union who was to become her husband in 1980 and her ‘rock’ thereafter.
The serious, dogged devotion to ‘public service’ and May’s occasionally pious insistence that her only goal was to ‘do what I think is right’ appeared to come from her father, Anglican vicar the Revd Hubert Brasier. The cabinet colleague who said, ‘She is extraordinarily self-contained,’ sought an explanation no deeper than her status as an only child, the death of both her parents in her mid-twenties and the Mays’ subsequent discovery that they could not have children. Hubert Brasier died in a car crash in October 1981; his wife Zaidee succumbed to multiple sclerosis a few months later. Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Barack Obama all lost parents when they were young.
When Andrea Leadsom, against whom May faced off for the Tory leadership in July 2016, questioned her suitability for the job because she was not a mother, it was Leadsom who was forced to drop out. Yet the questions she raised about May’s emotional intelligence were to become a feature of her difficulties eleven months later. Leadsom had been the third major rival to self-immolate. George Osborne had gone down with David Cameron’s ship after lashing himself to the mast of the Remain campaign during the EU referendum. Then, as the battle to replace him began, Boris Johnson showed less commitment to victory than his campaign manager, Michael Gove, would have liked, prompting Gove to declare him unfit for the top job, a shot fired from such an angle that it ricocheted into Gove’s own foot. The result was that May inherited the Tory crown without either her colleagues or herself learning what she was like under sustained fire during a campaign. They were soon to know.
Those looking for clues about the sort of prime minister she would be would have found contradictory messages from her past. After twelve years at the Bank of England and a council career in Merton, south-west London, where she crossed paths with another future colleague, Chris Grayling, May became an MP in the Labour landslide of 1997. These were the darkest days of opposition. She was the first of her intake into the shadow cabinet two years later. Initially, May was seen as a moderniser. As the first female party chairman in 2002, she delivered a few home truths from the conference platform, urging the grassroots to change. ‘You know what people call us? The nasty party.’ Katie Perrior, May’s press mouthpiece at the time, recalled, ‘The traditionalists around Iain Duncan Smith, the Tory leader, were ordering Mrs May to remove the words “nasty party” from the speech. On the floor below, a gang of modernisers including Mrs May, staring two huge electoral defeats in the face, were thinking there was not much to lose and were determined to press on.’1 May did not endorse the ‘nasty party’ label but to many members she had legitimised criticism of her own team. Yet, her analysis that the public were losing faith in politics was ahead of its time.
May’s appointment as home secretary by David Cameron in 2010, when the coalition government was formed, added further layers of complexity to her politics. Cameron joked that he and May were the only two ministers who supported the Tory commitment to reduce net immigration to the ‘tens of thousands’. Yet May also led a crackdown on police ‘stop and search’ powers, which she felt were directed unfairly at young black men, and a crusade to stamp out modern slavery. May was hard to categorise politically. Nick Timothy said, ‘Those things aren’t mutually exclusive but hearing it from the same person leads people to think, “I don’t really understand what that person stands for.” She doesn’t allow herself to be put into ideological boxes.’2 Colleagues think being home secretary changed her. A former special adviser said, ‘If you spend years and years saying something you do end up believing it. When she was shadow work and pensions I used to work with her on things like parental leave. She was into gender equality and social liberalism. Being home secretary for six years does something to you.’ Willie Whitelaw, who lost the 1975 leadership contest to Margaret Thatcher and then became her home secretary, is said to have remarked that no home secretary should ever become prime minister because they spend their time trying to stop things from happening rather than leading from the front.
The pattern May set in the first decade became a blueprint for her premiership – pathological caution punctuated by moments of great boldness and bravery. She fought a tenacious and ultimately successful battle to deport Abu Qatada, the ‘hate preacher’ branded Osama bin Laden’s ambassador in Europe – in the face of a Human Rights Act that appeared to make it impossible. She woke up one morning in 2012 and used the human rights of Asperger’s sufferer Gary McKinnon as reason not to deport him to face hacking charges in the United States, a decision that took guts even if it did virtually guarantee the support of the Daily Mail, which had been campaigning for McKinnon, in a future leadership contest. Former Home Office official Alasdair Palmer said, ‘When she is convinced that her cause is right, May can be determined, even obstinate.’
In the Cameron cabinet, May was an oddity, someone the Cameroons would have liked to ignore but knew they could not. Her abilities and virtues stood in direct counterpoint to those of Cameron and his sidekick George Osborne. Where Cameron excelled at presentation and pulling victory from the jaws of defeat with glib displays of concentration and political charisma, May was a grinder, a determined reader of documents who moved towards her conclusions with all the facility of a static caravan on a low loader. Having reached those conclusions, she was unbending in their defence however inconvenient her colleagues found it.
Where Cameron was open, May was secretive. One civil service official said May and her Home Office permanent secretary Helen Ghosh ‘would go for weeks without speaking’. May regularly kept both Number 10’s staff and her own in the dark about her intentions. A longstanding aide added, ‘She’ll tell you the truth. If she doesn’t want to tell you, she won’t make any bones about it, she just won’t tell you. That’s not an insult, it’s just that she’s keeping her own counsel.’ Where Osborne was imaginatively political and tactical, May obsessed about doing the right thing after due consideration, sticking to her principles. ‘Politics,’ she was fond of saying, ‘is not a game.’ Cameron and Osborne revelled in being the best game players in town.
While the Cameroons shared dinner parties as well as political views, May dined in the Commons with her husband. In her leadership launch speech, she explained, ‘I don’t gossip about people over lunch. I don’t go drinking in Parliament’s bars.’ A senior party official said, ‘She is the least clubbable politician I know.’ Alasdair Palmer had a typical lunch experience: ‘She lacks the personal charm of most politicians. Conversation was not easy. Somewhat to my alarm, May had no small talk whatsoever. She was perfectly comfortable with silence, which I found extremely disorienting.’3 This detachment would continue in Downing Street, where one aide observed, ‘She’s so removed from the world her colleagues live in.’ The aide said, ‘Gavin [Williamson, the chief whip] would come in and explain that this MP was having an affair. The “ins and outs” stuff the whips call it. She’d just be exasperated and say, “Why can’t they just do the job.”’
There was a peculiarly English social edge to May’s differences with the Cameroons. They were public schoolboys, easy company in the salons of the capital; she was a provincial grammar-school girl with no small talk. Although she and Cameron shared a home counties Conservatism, his social circle touched the lower hem of the aristocracy while May was the product of genteel vicarage austerity. Cameron’s Christianity, it was said, ‘comes and goes’ like ‘Magic FM in the Chilterns’; May’s was steadfast if seldom talked about. Where Cameron’s approach to those less well-off found voice in a Macmillanite soft paternalism, May’s