When former Conservative Chancellor Kenneth Clarke was caught on camera a week ago calling her “a bloody difficult woman,” the hashtag #bloodydifficultwoman began trending, with the twitter world asking if that statement would be ever be said by a man of a man. Theresa May, who becomes the United Kingdom’s second woman prime minister on Wednesday, was unfazed. She took it as a compliment and her retort was that Jean-Claude Juncker [President of the European Commission] will be “the next person to find that out”.
Viewed as a latter-day Maggie Thatcher – tough, uncompromising and hard-working (though with a womanly penchant for fancy shoes), Ms. May won the leadership contest when her closest rival Andrea Leadsome pulled out of the race. She will lead the country into what is going to be her biggest challenge, negotiating a good Brexit deal for Britain.
Prime Minister David Cameron’s resignation after the European referendum vote followed by the ugly leadership contest within the party allowed Ms. May, who is said to have always had prime ministerial ambitions, to emerge as the “unity” candidate. For the present her rivals in the Conservative Brexit camp group comprising former London Mayor Boris Johnson, Justice Secretary Michael Gove, former Defence Secretary Liam Fox and Energy Secretary Andrea Leadsome, have been silenced and sidelined, and she has the support of a majority in the party.
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Ms. May has now to establish her credentials for leading the Brexit talks despite having allied herself with Remain in the recent European referendum. Opposition parties have called for a fresh general election on the grounds that as a Remain candidate Ms May must seek a fresh popular mandate.
Unlike the largely male and posh, Eton-Oxbridge educated Conservative leadership that currently rules at Westminster, Ms. May’s family roots “are very much downstairs rather than upstairs” as family history expert Roy Stockhill notes in his blog. Ms. May's father was an Anglican Vicar, her grandmothers were in domestic service as young women, and her great-grandfather was a butler.
It was not a silver-spoon upbringing for Theresa Brasier. She was educated at a state primary school, a convent girls’ school and a state comprehensive. She read geography at Oxford University, where she met her future husband Philip May through the late Benazir Bhutto who was in college with her. She became a London borough Councillor and got into Parliament from Maidenhead after twice losing in Labour seats.
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Ms. May was not an active Remain campaigner, and during the leadership election emphasised her political experience – she has been the longest-serving Home Secretary in the Conservative Party – and dependability. “Brexit means Brexit and we are going to make a success of it” she said, assuring her supporters that she would not try and reverse that verdict, but would on the other hand work to get Britain the best deal. She has said that the earliest she would activate Article 50 of the EU charter, which allows states to voluntarily leave the union, is late 2016.
Ms. May has so far been on the hard-right wing of the Conservative Party. As Home Secretary, she promised to reduce the numbers of immigrants to the “tens of thousands” a figure her government could not achieve despite her enforcing more stringent immigration rules through a new and tougher immigration bill.
She was the only candidate for leadership who did not give a public commitment to allow European Union migrants already in the UK to stay on. That would be part of the negotiations, she said.