Eric Pickles worked closely with Theresa May for many years and is never less than complimentary about his fellow Tory. “But it’s true it takes an awful lot of time to get to know her,” he says. “I’m not sure anyone has ever entirely got to know her.” To this biography, Rosa Prince gives the subtitle “The Enigmatic Prime Minister”. Thus the author sets her own exam question: who is the woman behind the mask of steely self-control?
The search begins in childhood. I’ve wondered if May is irritated that she is constantly labelled “the vicar’s daughter”. Does she not mind being defined by her father’s occupation? Apparently not, because she has repeatedly referred to it herself and the chapters on her upbringing, the most revealing section of this biography, explain why. It was a comfortable and secure upbringing in rural Oxfordshire with the Rev Hubert Brasier, an Anglican of the high church tradition, and Zaidee, May’s mother, about whom I would have liked to learn more.
It also sounds a lonely childhood. She was an only child and a reserved and shy one. Admiration for her father seems to have been tinged with some resentment that he had to be shared with his parishioners. A school contemporary recalls her as “very quiet… extremely studious… the person who always did their homework”. The vicar’s child could never be anything less than well-behaved, especially when there were no siblings to share the burden of responsibility. The young Theresa was, in her own words, a “goody two shoes”.
That’s a provocation to a journalist to find evidence to the contrary. I don’t doubt that Rosa Prince, a former Westminster correspondent for the Telegraph and a diligent researcher, sniffed around for something scandalous – or just mildly surprising – about her subject’s formative years. She comes up empty-handed. There are no youthful experiments with drugs. Certainly not any encounters with dead pigs. The raciest anecdote from her time at Oxford has May walking along the top of a wall “slightly merry”; a very different world to the alcohol-fuelled debauches of the Bullingdon Club dinners frequented by her predecessor as prime minister and her foreign secretary. Whereas they read PPE and classics, traditional degrees for Tory boys with political ambition, she was a geographer.
Ms Prince does not discover any love life before Theresa meets her future husband, Philip, at a Conservative Association disco. They forged a bond that is clearly extremely strong. While most MPs spend their evenings at Westminster networking and scheming with journalists and colleagues, Mrs May preferred the company of her husband, with whom she would share an intimate supper. The saying in Whitehall is that the chancellor, Philip Hammond, is “the second most important Philip in the government”.
Ambition pulsed under the buttoned-up exterior. She was about 12 when she first announced an intention to be an MP. Some remember her declaring that she wanted to be Britain’s first female prime minister – and being annoyed when Margaret Thatcher got there first. Where that ambition came from is a bit mysterious. May says it sprang from a desire, inculcated by her upbringing, to do “public service”. This is what all politicians say, and sometimes it is even true, but there is always more to it than that.
No one else saw a potential leader. She wasn’t head girl at her grammar school and lost a mock election to the more charismatic rival who was. She participated in the Oxford Union, but was not rated a future star by contemporaries. While the Tory party’s gilded youths were accelerating up the greasy pole via jobs at Conservative Central Office, she took the slow lane to parliament through local government. She’d turned 40 before she became an MP. By surely painful contrast, David Cameron was a year younger when he became Tory leader.
In 2010, when her party got back into government after a 13 year absence, most observers thought May was destined to be a middle-order cabinet minister, distinguished mainly by the attention-seeking footwear that she adopted as an emblem and a defence mechanism to distract journalists from asking personal questions she didn’t want to answer. She was still alone in seeing herself as a future prime minister. On this account, it was George Osborne who rescued her from obscurity by pushing Cameron to make her home secretary. Irony of ironies. Their motives were not altruistic. She was dependable and hardworking, a natural rule-follower and no discernible threat. They needed a female face in one of the top jobs. She wasn’t in the Camborne clique, so it would be no great loss if she was destroyed by a department that has been the graveyard of many political careers.
As things turned out, and despite her much-resented exclusion from and clashes with Cameron’s inner circle, she was the longest-lasting home secretary in more than 60 years. This testified to resilience and meticulousness. Leading that crisis-prone department intensified the rigid and controlling sides of her character. One Lib Dem minister describes her rule as “a thinly veiled reign of terror” in which creative thinking was smothered. Civil servants and colleagues learned to fear the icy reprimand: “I’m very disappointed”.
Though she got a reputation as a martinet, obsessed with immigration targets that were never hit, there were liberal, progressive dimensions to her tenure. She put energy into tackling sex trafficking and domestic violence, as well as introducing groundbreaking legislation to criminalise psychological abuse within relationships. She reformed police stop and search when presented with the evidence about its disproportionate use against young black men. She unleashed her wrath on the Police Federation, which richly deserved the beating she gave it.
The author, while generally admiring of May, is clear that she has a vengeful streak. The vicar’s daughter doesn’t think that turning the other cheek applies in politics – she takes an eye for an eye. “Once crossed, she would always seek revenge. Her grudges could last years. A victim might find themselves frozen out or treated with cool disdain until a right moment could be found for more savage retribution.” Testimony to that was the large heap of Cameroon corpses left in Downing Street when she became prime minister, among them Osborne, who was sacked in a way designed to maximise his humiliation. The Tory MP Keith Simpson suggests it was her revenge on Tory men, especially the public-school boys whom she found frivolous and obnoxious, for “20 years of being patronised”.
Her promises to deliver a “different kind of Conservatism” have yet to bear much fruit and are hugely contingent on the outcome of Brexit. This biography sheds little illumination on what Mayism amounts to and comes too early to offer a solid verdict about her performance at Number 10. Where Rosa Prince succeeds is in providing a thorough and clear guide to the making of the prime minister. Damian Green, a contemporary at Oxford who sits in her cabinet, gets it right when he remarks: “The key to Theresa is what you see is what you get.”
That’s the May secret: there is no mystery. She’s the sphinx without a riddle. She is what she is. We will all get to observe whether that is quite enough.
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