Barely has the bell rung for the new school term at Westminster and disputatious ministers are causing unnecessary din. Last week Liam Fox was recorded saying – more truthfully than outraged business voices have reflected – that there is a serious problem with Britain’s trade deficit, and a boardroom culture of herding private reward has left too few mature companies questing hard enough for foreign business.

The psychology of Mrs May and her grammar school crusade | Andrew Rawnsley Read more

I would be very surprised if Philip Hammond, Theresa May’s worldly chancellor, does not share the concern about our current account deficit that emerges in these comments. But the saturnine Hammond is wise enough not to use the words “fat”, “lazy” and “golf” in proximity to British business.

David Davis, the Brexit minister – who always assumes he knows better than his titular bosses – was last week effectively ruling out remaining in the single market, thus eating up valuable negotiating territory ahead of time. And the wider Brexit bunch were noisy too: Boris Johnson will join Michael Gove and others in pursuit of “hard Brexit” – the Usain Bolt variety, in which success is defined by a dash to the finish line – fearing that May prefers the Hotel California sort, where the UK checks out of the EU but never really leaves its structures.

Add to that a backlash from the Lords and some Cameronians (a few open, many grumbling) about the push for more grammar schools, and the prime minister has her hands full, before a single vote is held.

What will be the response of the May machine? No one doubts she can do tough. Her dispatch of Gove, after a long period of tension in cabinet and the fiasco of his attack on his ally Boris Johnson, was a brutal reckoning, accompanied by a lesson on loyalty. Gove and George Osborne now inhabit a corridor of what the Soviets used to call “previous people”, the parliamentary equivalent of a holding pen.

Enemies dispatched, the task of reining in others needs to commence fast. She cannot continue to allow a situation in which ministers sound off their personal views on something as crucial as single-market membership, with too many government ministers sounding like a Twitter profile at the moment: “All views my own”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Amber Rudd, the home secretary who is fast becoming a mini-May.’ Photograph: Getty Images

Her team points out that whether it’s Brexit or grammar schools, she intends to be fully hands on, so internal opposition, while distracting, will not throw Mayism off course. Practically she had no choice but to embrace hardline Brexiteers, given that both she and Hammond were EU remainers. She has also insisted on personally chairing the main EU Brexit committee, ensuring no policy is developed without her knowledge. A civil servant who knows her well says that when it comes to party and Whitehall organisation, “no one knows better where the stop and start levers are than May”.

Distractions matter, though. Too great an indulgence of them will feed the story that Brexit is a chaotic mess or bottle up the kind of resentments on the right that undermined John Major. True, May is a more self-confident, less nervy prime minister than him. Her secret weapon is that she has a good deal of control over the coming timeline. Hence her instant resistance to triggering article 50, and insistence that she does not intend to hold an early election. (I would not treat this as an infallible guarantee, but it shows she intends to play a long game.)

It is also true of the grammar schools push: the intention will take a long time to deliver on any scale, but it shows how powerful her personal imprint is. Outside a clique of modernisers, most Conservatives have hankered for the return of grammar schools as vital lost territory, and May is closer to their instincts – by experience and belief – than her predecessors.

Her embrace of grammars also signals something many Tories believe but were dissuaded by Cameron-Osborne from articulating. No amount of graphs about overall outcomes, they feel, can stop a lot of parents – including those who consider themselves progressives or even on the left – wanting to send children to selective schools. Therefore, according to the May worldview, people want something the government has been stopping them from having – and that is wrong.

People do not live in the world of big data about overall outcomes, they look to their families and immediate experience

Here is Mayism in a nutshell. People do not live in the world of big data about overall outcomes, they look to their families and immediate experience – just as the argument that immigration benefits Britain overall was outdone by the experience of many voters.

With the exception of the writings of her policy guru, Nick Timothy, Mayism has had little definition up to now, beyond a securocratic tendency, frustration at supra-national legal meddling, and a readiness to take on the reform-reluctance of the police. Now that narrow offering must become broader, without much road-testing beyond the commitment of a loyal but quite narrow inner team. This entails freedom, but at the risk of over-complication.

May seeks to offset the argument that grammars entrench social division with a push for selective schools to take many more students from poorer backgrounds and expand in areas of deprivation. Far from foolish in itself, but aligning the objectives so they work together will, in the face of political opposition, tie the plan up in knots for years.

Both the Conservative party at large and voters who, due to Labour’s self-destruction, now expect continued Tory government will want to know that May is dependably in charge. Amber Rudd, the home secretary who is fast becoming a mini-May – the silky explainer of what the prime minister really wants – made clear on the Andrew Marr Show today that the balance of immigration concern and openness to Europe (and beyond) matters (a slap to those who want to give up single market membership without fighting for a trade-off).

Rudd, you may recall, enlivened the referendum campaign with the insight that Boris is “not the man you want driving you home at the end of the evening”. Now, she reflected: “Boris is not the driver, Theresa May is the driver.” Very well. May has reset the Conservative satnav. Her premiership will be judged on how well-chosen her routes turn out to be. Seatbelts will be required.

• Anne McElvoy is Senior Editor at The Economist.