EVERYTHING in politics comes back to Machiavelli in the end. That much Friedrich Schiller understood. From the 18th century dramatist’s pen flowed imperfect, squishily human characters who have read “The Prince” and know that to exert their will in the world they must become iron. Take “Mary Stuart”, his play about the Queen of Scots, now on at the Almeida Theatre in London. Elizabeth I is loth to sign her cousin and rival’s death warrant until, in a sylvan encounter, Mary fails to show due humility. Schiller depicts a side of Gloriana that England opts to forget: even dear Old Bess had to be cynical, sly and brutal to keep power in her society. She had to break people.

Bagehot would not reach for the comparison if Theresa May did not do so herself. The prime minister has named Elizabeth the historical figure with whom she most identifies: “She stood up for Britain…had a very clear vision about what she wanted to do.” And there is something there: images of the munificent, nation-uniting leader (the prime minister’s party is close to its highest poll numbers in decades) up against perfidious continentals mingle awkwardly with the brutality she patently feels she has to mete out to stay on top.

Consider Boris Johnson. The foreign secretary is no Queen of Scots. Mrs May would lose little sleep over finishing him off (politically, at least). Yet like Schiller’s Elizabeth, she is intensely suspicious of prospective rivals, especially ones who do not defer to her authority and threaten to upset her plans. Mr Johnson ticks those boxes: routinely veering off message, issuing freelance policy announcements and flashing Eurosceptic ankle at Tory MPs who are destined to be disappointed by Mrs May’s efforts in Brussels next year.

The prime minister has responded with jaw-dropping ferocity. When the man she made foreign secretary only five months ago (correctly) accused Saudi Arabia of conducting proxy wars in the Middle East he was publicly disowned: the comments were “not the government’s position”. This, after a torrent of prime ministerial mockery: “I seem to remember the last time he did a deal with the Germans he came back with three nearly new water cannon,” she tweaked in the summer, when the two were rivals for the top job; in her October conference speech she feigned shock that he had stayed “on message for a full four days”; in Parliament on December 14th she allowed that her acronym for him was FFS (“Fine Foreign Secretary”, she explained, though the hint was something else). Most striking was a joke last month in which—referring to an account of Michael Heseltine, a former deputy prime minister, strangling his mother’s dog—she looked her foreign secretary in the eye and boomed: “Boris, the dog was put down...when its master decided it wasn’t needed any more.”

Notwithstanding a dry private wit, Mrs May is not the sort who takes humour lightly. Her mockery of Mr Johnson serves a purpose: control. This speaks to her statecraft, which differs substantially from that of David Cameron. Her predecessor ran what might be described as a liberal dictatorship. The major decisions were reached in a tight cabal containing the prime minister, George Osborne and their advisers. The cabinet made relatively few big, meaningful decisions. Yet day to day, individual ministers were mostly free to run their fiefs as they saw fit: Michael Gove to enact his education revolution, Iain Duncan Smith to try (and broadly fail) to overhaul the welfare system, Mrs May to run the Home Office as a sort of private fortress.

Under her premiership things could hardly be more different. The cabinet makes real decisions. Its subcommittees plunge into the details. Ministers are expected to know each other’s patches. To rub it all in, the prime minister gave them a bound collection of past cabinet transcripts for Christmas: the cabinet is back, is the message. Individually, however, ministers are weak. David Davis, the Brexit secretary, has received the “not speaking for the government” treatment. Justine Greening, the education secretary, must bang the drum for new grammar schools despite her own doubts. Philip Hammond, though friendly with Mrs May and outspoken on Brexit, eschews the imperial ostentations of most of his recent predecessors. The prime minister has appointed her own economic adviser. She has also ordered the seizure of the phone and e-mail records of ministers suspected of leaking news to the press. The braver in their midst, and top civil servants, whisper of the U-turns and bottlenecks caused by the requirement that policies go through Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, Mrs May’s granitic chiefs of staff, and by the verbal invigilations the prime minister puts them through before approving things.

Full throttle

This Sturm und Drang extends beyond the cabinet. Mrs May did not just dismiss Mr Osborne and Mr Gove when she took office; she gave each a dressing down in the process. Gavin Williamson, her parliamentary enforcer, lets a tarantula named Cronus (after the castrator of Greek myth) scuttle about his desk during meetings—supposedly to intimidate MPs. When Nicky Morgan, the former education secretary, made a snippy remark about a pair of leather trousers worn by the prime minister, Downing Street blew a gasket: “Don’t bring that woman to No 10 again,” stormed a text from Ms Hill to another former minister.

It pays to mark the limits of what one might call Mrs May’s autocratic democracy. Mr Timothy is not, as some accounts put it, a “Rasputin”. Ms Hill is neither truly “terrifying” nor “paranoid”. And the prime minister did not “threaten to exterminate” Mr Johnson. Yet there is something of Elizabeth about Britain’s still new and little-understood prime minister. She is severe and pugilistic, more so than her predecessor. Done right—as Schiller implied in “Mary Stuart”—this mastery of the will is the essence of power. Done wrong, Machiavelli warned, it leads to enemies, resentment and downfall. It’s all in the execution.

Economist.com/blogs/bagehot