Theresa May is tough, cool and efficient … but could she lead the Tories?

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/sep/27/theresa-may-tories

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It won't happen today, or tomorrow, or next month. But sooner or later, and the polls suggest sooner than David Cameron would like, there must be a new Conservative party leader. And who is chosen will be a litmus test of what we want from politics in a more sober, chastened age.

You might call it the Rachel Reeves question, although the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury wouldn't thank you for it: is charisma still everything, or could an era of cool, capable, but not wildly exciting superwomen be nigh? Theresa May seems to think it is.

"The line from her office is 'we're not doing anything to destabilise Cameron but if we don't win she is a contender'," says a senior Tory who has known the home secretary for many years. "I think she's been sitting there quietly, with [her husband] Philip, and she's thought 'I don't think Cameron's going to win'."

So while her leader arrives in Manchester jangling a pocketful of pre-election bribes, May's speech to party conference on Monday will attract more than polite interest. It may not, admittedly, be a barrel of laughs. "You have lunch with Theresa and you feel – well, I don't mean trivial but unserious. I remember at someone's birthday party the person sitting next to her saying oh Lord, what am I going to talk to her about?" says a female friend. "But if you were taking Margaret Thatcher to lunch in the early 1970s, would you have had a terribly fun time? Probably not."

And to write May off too lightly, as has happened throughout her career, would be a mistake. Once dismissed as an over-promoted token woman, she has held her own in one of the toughest jobs in cabinet, combining classic conservative values of frugality, propriety and stoicism with thoroughly modern instincts.

Feminist causes she was once mocked for championing are now mainstream Tory thinking, and her legacy includes two things which arguably shaped the modern party far more than hugging huskies: the A-list scheme for candidate selection, which gave birth to several rising stars, and the infamous "nasty party" speech, which made Tories take a long, hard look in the mirror.

"It crystallised the sentiment, allowed people to decide that actually something did need to be done," says Mark MacGregor, chief executive of the party at the time of the speech and a godfather of Tory modernisation. "It was no longer something that was discussed among a few backbenchers. And it was the basis on which Cameron got elected."

Nothing else she has done so encapsulates her strengths – a cool analytical brain, a gut feel for public opinion, a surprisingly unconventional streak – but also her weaknesses, chiefly a knack of raising hackles. Beneath that brisk exterior beats a subversive heart.

Theresa Brasier, the only child of Hubert and Zaidee, was born in Eastbourne in 1956 but grew up in rural Oxfordshire, where her father was a vicar. It wasn't, however, a Chipping Norton set kind of childhood. Ostentatious behaviour was frowned on in the family, with May recalling the understanding that "you didn't think about yourself, the emphasis was on others". As the vicar's daughter her behaviour was always under public scrutiny.

To this day, she's an odd mixture of knowing display – scarlet boots, black leather – and buttoned-up reserve. Her role model, she once unexpectedly said, is the cricketer Geoff Boycott for the way he "kind of solidly got on with what he was doing".

She used to listen to the cricket on the radio with her father, who also encouraged an early interest in current affairs. She knew she wanted to be an MP by the age of 12. After what wasn't quite a bog-standard state education – village primary, then a fee-paying convent for a couple of years, winning a place aged 13 at Holton Park girls' grammar, which turned comprehensive during her time – St Hugh's, Oxford, provided the perfect place to raise her sights.

Founded for women in the days when Oxford refused them degrees, the college still trains its female students to push at the boundaries of what women can do. The sense that anything was possible must only have increased when, at the end of the then Theresa Brasier's first year, Margaret Thatcher became the first female Tory leader.

Yet while she joined the Oxford University Conservative Association, she wasn't its star. The president in her final year was Damian Green, who later beat her to the safe seat of Ashford (although the tortoise did eventually overtake the hare, since he's now her junior at the Home Office.) But university did bring her one priceless political asset: her husband.

She was chatting to fellow student Benazir Bhutto at a young Tories' disco when Philip May wandered over. Bhutto introduced them, and that was that. The couple married three years after she graduated and were still newlyweds when May suffered the first great trauma of her life, the sudden death of her father in a car crash. When her mother also died a year later, her husband became the only family she had – something that may explain not only their intense closeness as a couple but what one friend calls her "powerfully projected sense of the cat that walks alone". If she is unusually self-contained, perhaps it was learned the hard way.

Philip May, a popular figure with a successful City career, now goes loyally to all the networking parties she doesn't have time for and dispenses the bonhomie she can't. "I don't think she would have managed all of this without Philip at her side: he's a modern day Denis Thatcher," says one friend of the couple. He is, confirms another family friend, endlessly supportive: "In Labour circles that's the norm but in Tory circles it's really, really not. He will do stuff so she doesn't have to." Although they both love hiking and she's a keen cook, life inevitably revolves around her long working hours.

The couple are childless, a topic still too raw for friends to broach easily. All she will say publicly is that she wanted children but it just didn't happen. So while her contemporaries changed nappies, May spent days in the City – she joined the Bank of England from university, then the Association of Payment Clearing Services – and her nights on politics.

When she was elected to Merton council, in south London, in 1986 it was clearly a stepping-stone to higher things. "She was already polished, much more sophisticated than the rest of us," recalls Siobhain McDonagh, then a fellow Merton councillor and now a Labour MP. May worked conscientiously as a councillor while scouting for a parliamentary seat (she fought two unwinnables before landing Maidenhead, then a marginal) but never, says McDonagh, seemed to feel strongly about anything. And that's what still troubles Tory MPs. What, if anything, does May really believe?

"She doesn't dazzle in a Boris or Gove way but she's much cleverer than people would naturally think," says a former Tory adviser who worked with her in the early days. "If you said to most people 'rank the cabinet on intellectual terms' she might come near the bottom, but I would put her at the top." Elected in 1997, she was on the frontbench by 1998, in shadow cabinet by 1999, but it was a perilously steep learning curve.

Initially she was nervous in the Commons, stilted in interviews, with a reputation for adopting the opinion of whomever she had last spoken to: "Theresa May, or she may not" was the running joke. But she has methodically tackled her flaws and dominates the chamber now. The way she wrongfooted MPs gossiping about her recent weight loss – it was, she revealed, down to having diabetes – suggests an increasingly sure media touch.

But it's her time at the Home Office that has been the gamechanger. To have survived three years there remains no mean feat, despite blunders such as her half-baked claim that an illegal immigrant avoided deportation because of his cat. "My view of people who said she was over-promoted is that she's totally proved them wrong," says Jacqui Smith, one of her Labour predecessors as home secretary. "It appears to me that she has a very good grasp of the things she needs to grasp. She doesn't feel the need to grandstand."

The Tory MP Cheryl Gillan, who served with her in cabinet, thinks she is routinely underestimated simply because she doesn't play the male game: she sits back and listens in meetings rather than throwing her weight around. "She's a tremendous listener, she takes it all in, and I think that is often women's operating style," says Gillan.

But while May has competently pushed through Downing Street's police and immigration changes, "what she hasn't done is things that were necessarily her idea", according to Smith. She seems consumed less by a longing to change the world than a workmanlike desire to run things well. The closest thing she has to a driving passion may be pulling other women up the ladder. She isn't afraid to call herself a feminist, and the ferocious battles she fought with male colleagues over opening up politics to women have changed the way her party looks, feels and thinks.

It was the creation of Women2Win, a pressure group she set up with the veteran Tory activist Anne (now Lady) Jenkin to support female candidates, that helped persuade Cameron shortly after he became leader to adopt the A-list – 100 favoured candidates, half of them female. There are high-flying women in the Commons who essentially owe their jobs to her.

What she has lacked, however, is a broader political vision, a gap she moved to fill this summer with a keynote speech to a Conservative Home conference. The stall she set out combined some big thinking – for example, on turning public services over to private, profit-making companies – with an astute focus on the blue-collar Tories deserting Cameron. MPs detected the fingerprints of her special adviser, Nick Timothy, all over it but it was the closest thing yet to a Mayite mission statement.

McDonagh thinks May's unusually detached approach has served her well. "You don't feel she would go to the stake for anyone or anything and perhaps that's her thing. She doesn't get emotionally caught up in it all." She steps back, surveys the big picture, isn't swayed by human drama (which may explain why she is said to have raised questions over bombing Syria). And it's this unsentimental streak that liberated her to make a speech no other senior Tory would.

Back in the autumn of 2002, May found herself chairman of a party that was, under Iain Duncan Smith, falling apart. She could have played it safe, using her conference speech to take cheap shots at Labour. Instead, she turned the guns on her own side.

"Twice we went to the country unchanged, unrepentant, just plain unattractive. And twice we got slaughtered," she told a startled audience. It's as neat a summary of the case for Tory modernisation as anything Cameron ever said. Yet the line everyone remembers is: "You know what some people call us? The nasty party." Her argument that they should show the label was unfair was lost in the uproar.

Were the inflammatory words even hers? Mark MacGregor flatly denies speculation that he wrote the speech, although he was one of several people consulted. By all accounts, May pondered several phrases before settling on "nasty" and agonised in private over whether to go ahead. But ultimately, she was convinced her party couldn't move forward without confronting the perception they were shrill and uncaring.

History has vindicated her, but years on she is still paying the price. Activists and MPs alike took personal, noisy offence: insulted pensioners ripped up their membership cards in front of her. "Internally it caused chaos. Things just broke between the old guard and the modernisers and we were pretty much asked to choose sides," says an ex-party staffer. Within the year, Duncan Smith was forced out for Michael Howard, fostering suspicion that May was an unwitting pawn in a bigger game.

Yet she emerged from this harrowing year a changed politician: steelier, more willing to trust her instincts, and finally conscious of her own strength.

The first time she seriously considered running for leader was after the 2005 election defeat. May discreetly sounded out MPs but, realising she lacked support, swallowed her pride and backed the less experienced Cameron. After winning, he demoted her to shadow leader of the house. It was, says a friend, a "demoralising" time. Perhaps surprisingly, given their similar instincts, Cameron and May were never close and relations now are wary.

Within the wider cabinet, she is respected but not loved: she has fought formidable turf wars with Vince Cable, Ken Clarke and George Osborne. One witness describes how, when Michael Gove once made some "slightly provocative and not terribly well considered remarks" about a paper of hers in a meeting, she erupted: "What she could have done is just brush them aside but she leapt on it. She went off the handle. David Cameron just stared."

Within the Home Office, there are complaints that she is controlling and crushes initiative. Two capable junior minsters, Nick Herbert and Lady Neville-Jones, both left after clashes over policy, while the department's permanent secretary, Helen Ghosh, also quit amid reported tensions. One Home Office insider describes her style as "I'm in charge and you must recognise that".

Were she a man, of course, that might not raise an eyebrow: and after years of being patronised, it's perhaps no wonder she lashes out when her authority seems challenged. Nonetheless, questions remain over how she would manage and inspire colleagues as a leader.

"She's not very imaginative and she's not going to allow other people to be imaginative," says a senior Tory who has worked closely with her in government. "She belonged to a generation where you had to fight to get anything. But she's arrived now, and she can't adapt. It's a shame because I think it's a barrier to her further advancement."

Nor has she built anything like enough backbench support yet to beat the golden boy, Boris Johnson. While there's always a chance Johnson will shoot himself in the foot, or fail to return to Westminster in time for a contest, the suspicion is that she has risen as far as she ever will. But perhaps, to misquote Duncan Smith, one shouldn't underestimate the power of a quiet woman.

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