She stepped into a whirlwind to lead Britain into the Brexit era. But—leather trousers aside—Theresa May’s own style is decidedly no-drama. Gaby Wood meets her. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz.

If you’re running a country, most weeks present their difficulties, but the one in which I meet Theresa May is especially tumultuous. Five days earlier, she had become the first foreign leader to visit Donald Trump as president. The meeting was at first largely hailed in the British press as a diplomatic triumph, but within 24 hours it was portrayed as something closer to a disaster. May was on her way to Turkey—to meet President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, another high-risk encounter—when Trump issued his controversial executive order halting the admission of refugees and banning travel from seven Muslim-majority countries. May came under fire for not promptly condemning Trump’s actions and—in retrospect—for having invited him on a state visit before anyone had had a chance to see what kind of president he would be. She arrived home to find a member of the opposition Labour Party dubbing her “Theresa the appeaser,” in reference to Neville Chamberlain’s policy of capitulating to Hitler, and thousands of protesters gathered outside Downing Street.

May’s defense minister, Michael Fallon, had commented a few days earlier that we are no longer living in “benevolent times”—words that seemed to capture the waters through which Theresa May, the unelected prime minister of the United Kingdom, has chosen to steer a course.

I visit her on a Wednesday afternoon, between the vote in Parliament that would begin the process of leaving the European Union and a particularly pugilistic performance from May at the weekly grilling session known as Prime Minister’s Questions. At midday, she had been challenged in the House of Commons by Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, to heed the 1.8 million people who had demanded that she rescind Trump’s June invitation. May stood up and leaned in: one elbow on the ornate wooden dispatch box, shoulder turned toward her opponent, as if preparing to deliver a left hook to his jaw (a gesture she would later tell me was subconscious). “Let’s just see what he would have achieved in the last week,” she said to the packed green leather benches, whose acoustics roughly resemble those of a zoo. “Would he have been able to protect British citizens from the impact of the executive order? No. Would he have been able to lay the foundations of a trade deal? No. Would he have got a 100 percent commitment to NATO? No!” She paused to let the parliamentary roar die down before raising her voice to human-loudspeaker level. “He can lead a protest. I’m leading a country.”