While flashier talents have come and gone, the home secretary is now a potential leader of the Conservatives. What does her rise tell us about the Tory party today – and its relationship with women?

For a few days last autumn, Theresa May came within sight of the ultimate promotion. On 6 September, 12 days before the referendum on Scottish independence, a surprise poll putting the yes camp ahead by two points triggered sudden panic at Westminster. Secretly, Conservative MPs began discussing the options for replacing the prime minister if the United Kingdom were to break apart.

“People who were capable of thinking two steps ahead were saying, ‘OK, if Scotland leaves the union, does David Cameron have to go?’” said a senior backbencher. “To which the answer was, ‘Yes.’ But you can’t have a full-on leadership election eight months before an election. It has to be a coronation.”

What does the rise of Theresa May tell us about the Tory party today? Read more

There was a precedent for a bloodless coup. Back in 2003, Michael Howard replaced his exhausted predecessor Iain Duncan Smith as Tory leader essentially by unanimous agreement, sparing the party its third leadership contest in six years. The obvious choice this time, William Hague, was shortly to retire. “The next thought was, ‘It’s got to be Theresa,’” said the backbencher. “She could do the job. She has enemies, but not like George [Osborne] … She’d take charge going into the election, and perhaps she’d win and do five years.” Another MP close to a rival leadership candidate confirmed that, with Boris Johnson still outside parliament, “Theresa at that point would have had a good chance of becoming prime minister. And still might.”

The tide in Scotland turned so quickly that things never progressed beyond early conversations between backbenchers and former ministers. Those closest to May deny knowing anything about it until after the moment passed, although rumours of unrest certainly reached Cameron. But had 200,000 Scots voted differently, it is possible that the longest serving home secretary in half a century would now be in No 10.

May was never the obvious star of her generation. Yet while flashier talents have burned themselves out, at 58 she has emerged as the grown-up in the playground. Conscientious about things that others overlook, she works such long hours that one staffer who worked for her in opposition admitted that “it put me off being an MP: I took one look and thought, ‘Not if this is what it takes.’” Unlike Johnson, adored from a distance but sometimes disliked up close, she leaves crowds cold but colleagues grudgingly impressed by her tenacity. (Even Norman Baker, the former Home Office minister who recently described working with her as like “walking through mud”, conceded that “she’d be a good leader of her party, despite everything”.)

She works such long hours that one staffer who worked for her in opposition admitted that 'it put me off being an MP'

May is not a Roy Jenkins-style grand reformer, but nor is she simply an efficient vessel for other people’s ideas. In office she has grown, in reach and audacity. Tom Watson, the Labour MP and leading campaigner on police corruption, thinks the scandals unearthed during her time in office – from systematic phone hacking on Fleet Street to the alleged police cover-ups after the 1989 Hillsborough football stadium disaster – have genuinely changed her: “What I saw in 2010 was someone with a textbook Conservative home secretary playbook: defend the base, strong on law and order. Over time I have seen a change. She’s become in many ways quite radical. She’s been prepared to intervene on the police frankly as very few Labour home secretaries were.”

May’s bolder moments spring from a distrust of powerful establishments closing ranks – especially against women – and a strong sense of propriety and fairness. As a longstanding ally put it, she “dislikes nothing more than blokey, slightly drink-sodden, misogynistic, old‑fashioned organisations”. Unlike Thatcher, who declared herself no feminist and filled her cabinets with men, what makes May a crucial litmus test of changing Tory attitudes is that she will not renounce or apologise for her gender; she often advises younger women never to be afraid of doing things differently from men.

Unusually for a politician, she doesn’t yearn to be liked. During speeches she sometimes talks through applause, as if approval were the last thing she needed. May is often compared with that other no-nonsense female leader, Angela Merkel but there is an echo too of Gordon Brown. They share a religious upbringing, a belief in what Brown calls the “moral purpose” of politics, a reliance on fiercely protective advisers – and a micro-managing style that is both a strength and a weakness. If May tried to control a government as tightly as she does her department, said a close colleague, “I think she’d blow up. It would be Brown-like.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Theresa May and Boris Johnson visit Clapham, in south London, after the riots of August 2011. Photograph: David Levene

***

May’s roots are, as a certain kind of Tory would say, decidedly below-stairs. Both of her grandmothers were in domestic service, according to census records, one as a parlour maid and the other as a children’s nurse. Her father Hubert Brasier, an Anglican vicar, was 37 when he married her mother Zaidee, almost a decade his junior. Theresa, their only child, was born in 1956.

It was drummed into her from an early age that her behaviour must, as the vicar’s daughter, be above reproach. A lifelong churchgoer, to this day she claims parsimonious expenses and takes a dim view of scandal. (When her good friend, the charities minister Brooks Newmark, was caught sexting an undercover female reporter last year, unlike male colleagues she offered no sympathetic excuses: merely the public observation that he shouldn’t have done it.)

May’s mother was the active Tory, who got her daughter stuffing envelopes at election time, but May inherited her father’s sense of vocation. Used to parishioners calling on him night and day, she accepts work consuming her own life. “Her attitude is that you hand yourself over to other people. The door is always open,” said the former staffer.

When she was 13, her father took over the south Oxfordshire parish of Wheatley, and May was accepted at Holton Park girls’ grammar school in the village. Housed in an old stately home, complete with a moat into which girls tossed their straw boaters on leaving day, it looked rather like a minor public school – although a memoir by local author Marilyn Yurdan, complete with nostalgic foreword by May, notes that its pupils were the daughters of farmers and shopkeepers rather than wealthy families. When May was 15 it turned comprehensive, merging with the nearby secondary modern.

Although she went on to study at St Hugh’s, Oxford, her set, said a contemporary, “wasn’t Bullingdonesque; we were middle-class, grammar-school people”. The sense of being outside Cameron’s gilded set – bound together by old school ties, boisterous twentysomething holidays, and being godparents to each other’s children – lingers.

The gap is generational, as much as personal. Cameron was only just starting prep school when May, a decade his senior, arrived at Oxford in 1974 to study geography. While he came of age in an era of confident Tory dominance, her generation was shaped by “a sense that the world was coming to an end”, said another university friend. The backdrop to their university years was industrial strife, galloping inflation and Harold Wilson’s struggle with an economic crisis that led eventually to Britain being bailed out by the IMF. When strikes brought power cuts, students studied by candlelight, and sometimes tutors would interrupt economics tutorials to check the latest market developments.

Tory student politics, meanwhile, mirrored the turmoil in the national party that followed Edward Heath’s resignation as prime minister in March 1974, and would lead to Margaret Thatcher being elected leader almost a year later. Yet May remained curiously detached from the fierce ideological rows over how to tackle inflation or break the unions; while the Oxford University Conservative Association split into right and leftwing factions, she stuck to the middle. “She was coming at it more as a kind of moral thing than from a sort of intellectual curiosity,” said a university contemporary. That remains broadly true today. “Mayism” is hard to define partly because she is a centrist but mainly because she is governed less by ideology than by doing what she feels morally right.

If Thatcherism itself did not appeal, the possibilities opened up by the party’s first female leader did. To close university confidants, it was clear that May was already thinking of following in Thatcher’s footsteps. Yet it was her boyfriend Philip May, a steady young classicist she met at a student disco, who became president of the Oxford Union, not her: ironically, he was the one considered more likely to enter politics. (He is now an investment banker.) The journalist Michael Crick, another Oxford contemporary, remembers student politics being “sort of overshadowed” by the brilliant Benazir Bhutto, but the Tory stars were David Willetts, Damian Green, Alan Duncan and Dominic Grieve (all now MPs), not Theresa May.

If Thatcherism itself didn’t appeal, however, she was gripped by the possibilities Thatcher opened up

“She was always more ambitious than any of us noticed,” said a third university friend. “The truth is that in student elections you’re trying to impress 300 people who are all friends, and she didn’t have that kind of personality.” She was not factional, or Machiavellian, or theatrical; her forte is running things well, something only revealed in government.

Her natural self-consciousness didn’t help, either. As a teenager, tall for her age, she stooped to avoid standing out – a habit that recurs occasionally. To this day she fends off even mildly personal questions with long, defensive answers. (One reason she gets on so well with Daily Mail editor-in-chief Paul Dacre is that both prefer talking business to pleasure). She does relax, but only among those – mainly women – whom she completely trusts.

After graduating, she worked for the Bank of England, in the first of several unglamorous backroom policy jobs in banking. She and Philip married in 1980 but within months, their world crumbled. Rev Hubert Brasier died suddenly in a car crash and, at 25, May was left coping both with her grief and with her widowed mother, Zaidee, now with multiple sclerosis and using a wheelchair. When May’s mother died a few months later, Philip became the only real family she had. Their marriage remains her bedrock; at parties they work the room together, the more gregarious Philip charming people she cannot. “He adores her, always supports her; he’s never jealous of the fact that the limelight is on her,” said a friend of both. To their sadness, they have been unable to have children.

Yet even without the demands of a family, May did not have an easy path to Westminster. Elected to Merton council in 1986, she fought two unwinnable seats in the 1990s and struggled to get past the traditionally-minded activists selecting candidates for plum seats, who were famously suspicious of young women. (She still occasionally recounts how newspapers once reported that she could not get selected because of her small child – news to her, since she didn’t have one). When she finally reached Westminster in 1997, the new MP for Maidenhead was already pondering how to open the party up.

***

On October 7 2002, at the Tory party conference in Bournemouth, May walked onstage a relative nonentity and left it a front-page story. Voters saw the Tories, she told the audience, as the “nasty party”, heartless and remote. “Twice we went to the country unchanged, unrepentant, just plain unattractive. And twice we got slaughtered,” she said. Ploughing on regardless would not do.

It was the first time that most of May’s colleagues, many of whom grumpily regarded her as over-promoted because she was a woman, saw her clearly for what she was. Fast-tracked into the post of shadow education secretary in 1999 and struggling with her natural reserve, May had initially appeared stiff and nervous. When new leader Iain Duncan Smith made her party chairman, the summer after the thumping 2001 defeat, expectations were not high.

But that speech was a watershed moment. It crystallised everything that so-called Tory modernisers – who, like May, had fruitlessly backed Michael Portillo for the leadership in 2001 – felt about needing to break with the party’s toxic past. And while the party’s chief executive Mark McGregor – another supporter of Portillo – wrote much of the speech, the ideas were hers.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The then Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith listens to Theresa May delivering her ‘nasty party’ speech to the annual conference in 2002. Photograph: Martin Argles

There were private agonies over the use of the word “nasty”. “We even discussed saying we were the Millwall of politics: nobody likes us and we don’t care,” recalled one of those in the room. “But we do care, that’s the problem.”

Sneaking the argument past a cautious Duncan Smith, however, required some deviousness. The speech was never wholly cleared with his office. “I remember going back and forth saying, ‘Here’s the latest’, and people poring over it going, ‘This is horrendous, say this and you’ll regret it,’” said one of her team. “If they’d seen it (properly) I don’t think they’d ever have signed it off. But we just did it anyway. She’d had quite a lot of backstabbing, and I think she felt, ‘This is my moment to show people what I can do’.” Yet during the eve-of-speech rehearsals, May was nervous enough that one aide quietly asked: “Are you sure you want to do this?”

She did. The next day, wearing the leopard-print kitten heels that sparked an unexpected run on Russell & Bromley, May pinpointed the problem that dogs her party even now.

Not everyone, however, wanted to hear it. Backbenchers accused May of doing a “Ratner”, after the jeweller who famously called his own products “crap”. Activists tore up their membership cards in front of her. “It was difficult,” conceded a friend. “But she’d just say, ‘Well, why aren’t we winning? Where are we going wrong, if it isn’t this?’” May had finally found a way of using her slightly clinical outsider’s manner to her advantage – but also a platform for something she had long believed in: recruiting more female MPs. What better way, after all, to show that a supposedly heartless party had softened?

May’s feminism is distinctly Conservative – she believes in austerity economics, despite research showing welfare cuts hurt women more than men – but it is real. In opposition she did not just advocate flexible hours to help working women, but tried introducing it at party headquarters. She campaigned publicly on pay discrimination and fought privately for pay rises for female staff. As home secretary she has legislated against human trafficking, moved to tackle both FGM and so-called “coerceive control” or emotional abuse within relationships, and championed gay marriage. She is what the director of Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti, calls a “woman’s woman”, as even her opponents recognise. When May observed, at a party last December marking 40 years of the domestic violence charity Women’s Aid, that even now women’s suffering was still too often dismissed, the Labour MP behind me boomed: “Exactly”.

Initially, May followed up the “nasty party” speech with relatively modest measures, such as training members of selection panels in modern recruitment techniques. But after the 2005 election failed to produce a female breakthrough, May – by now shadow equalities minister – and her friend Anne Jenkin formed the campaign group Women2Win to mentor female candidates. Their work finally paid off in 2006 with the adoption of the A-list system May had championed, under which constituencies were encouraged to pick candidates from a list stuffed with female, gay and ethnic minority hopefuls. (Cabinet minister Liz Truss, employment minister Esther McVey and Cameron’s parliamentary aide Sam Gyimah are all A-list graduates.) Yet ironically, by the time it was adopted May’s own star was waning.

She seems to have first briefly considered running for leader the previous year, in 2005. With the party heading for its third consecutive defeat, the message of the “nasty party” speech had never looked more prescient, and she was more experienced than the modernisers’ new standard-bearer, David Cameron. May hesitated long enough over backing him to arouse suspicion. “The writing was on the wall for quite a while,” said a friend. “She had plenty of time and, well, that’s where she sometimes gets the reputation of not being able to make up her mind.” But May paid a price. When he won, Cameron demoted her to shadow leader of the Commons, a role so invisible some thought her frontbench career over.

Ideologically similar, Cameron and May were never personally close; his circle, elected mostly after 2001, largely regarded their elders as having blown their chance to change the party. “The Cameroons think we messed up. I don’t think they ever had much time for our generation,” said an old friend of May’s. Despite fighting her way back into the middle-ranking post of shadow work and pensions secretary, she was as shocked as everyone else when a victorious Cameron appointed her home secretary in May 2010.

***

Once again, critics sniped that May was little more than window dressing: a woman promoted to stop the cabinet looking overly male. Once again, they missed the point. Cameron moved May at least partly because of an emerging personality clash between her and his free-thinking welfare guru Lord Freud, who is said to have felt she was stifling his ideas. Five years on, the chaos engulfing Freud’s pet project of universal credit, suggests she had a point. But so did he.

May has a formidable reputation for second-guessing her juniors and needing to know every detail: she famously examines potential risks from every possible angle, and will not tolerate any minister trying to force her hand. “Theresa brooks no insubordination. If you try it on she will grimly mark you down for death,” said a longstanding colleague. The casualty rate for Home Office juniors – nicknamed the “Iron Maidens’ Club” – is correspondingly high.

Pauline Neville-Jones, her security minister, lasted a year before resigning; so did the Lib Dems’ Norman Baker, who fought a trench war for months just to publish a report on drugs policy that potentially challenged May’s anti-liberalisation stance. Nick Herbert, her policing minister, resigned after two years. Baker’s predecessor, Jeremy Browne, was sacked.

This iron grip is one explanation for her longevity, in a department notorious for bringing down political giants. And if her juniors sometimes felt smothered, it should be said that May sometimes felt patronised by them, asserting herself accordingly. But Baker, while insisting he didn’t personally leave because of May, said that the costs of her caution had been high: “There were some good ministers, competent people, who could have been given more freedom to do things and weren’t.” Were she leader, might she treat her cabinet similarly?

As Nick Clegg, Michael Gove, George Osborne, Boris Johnson and Vince Cable have all discovered, May can be exhausting to negotiate with, grinding opponents down. (Even Cameron avoids confrontation where possible. “If she wanted something, he liked to give it to her,” said a source who regularly observed their exchanges.) Ministerial meetings can be so frosty that “we used to dread going in”, said another attendee. When displeased, she sends what a Whitehall source called “extremely abrupt” letters, key passages irritably underlined.

Ask around Whitehall about her special advisers, meanwhile, and descriptions range from “hard as nails” via “obstreperous” to “ferocious”. “They annoyed the civil service, they annoyed Downing Street – relations haven’t been good and that was down to them,” said one ex-minister. Sharp, strong and legendarily loyal to their adored boss, her team – particularly press aide Fiona Cunningham, who resigned last summer after a public briefing spat with Gove, and her still-serving chief of staff Nick Timothy – take much credit for May’s surefootedness.

Ask around Whitehall about her special advisers and descriptions range from 'hard as nails' to 'ferocious'

But some think they have sailed too close to the wind, and never more so than during the Brodie Clark affair, perhaps the closest thing to a career-ending crisis May has faced. Clark, who ran the Border Force overseeing security at ports of entry, was suspended in November 2011, amid fears that passports were not being properly checked at Heathrow. With the nation already jittery over security in the runup to the 2012 Olympics, May came out fighting, accusing “senior officials” of jeopardising national security. When a furious Clark publicly contradicted May’s version of events, excerpts of a damaging internal review into his conduct promptly surfaced in the Daily Mail, triggering warnings at the highest level of the Home Office that May’s aides were “out of control”.

A leak inquiry ordered by the permanent secretary, Helen Ghosh, never publicly identified a culprit. But the episode – described even by a minister well disposed to May as “reprehensible” – suggested a hitherto unsuspected edge to the home secretary. This ruthless streak that, more appropriately channelled, can be powerfully effective.

In the spring of 2014, May returned to the scene of an old humiliation. Two years earlier, at the annual Police Federation conference, she was booed by officers furious at budget cuts and pay restructuring. This time, she had the moral high ground. The backdrop to her speech was nagging doubts over police integrity exposed by the so-called “Plebgate” scandal. Andrew Mitchell, the government chief whip, had been forced to resign in October 2012 after being accused of calling a police officer who refused to open the Downing Street gate for him a “pleb”. Yet before long, doubts emerged both over the details and the role of some federation representatives in backing the story up. By the time May addressed the federation in Bournemouth on 21 May, emotions were running high on all sides.

The police must change, she said, or have change forced on them. Officers sat silently as she listed the charges, ranging from the bugging of Stephen Lawrence’s grieving family and the death of an innocent man caught in the G20 protests to allegations of corruption and federation officials boozing on expenses. Such failures had, she argued, jeopardised the idea of policing by public consent and to ignore that “would be letting down the people in whose interests I am elected and you are employed to serve”.

There is, said one adviser who was present that day, “definitely something personal” about May’s battle with the police. “She’s faced a very dismissive attitude at times from them. The police organisations are very hierarchical, very macho.” But while the case for reform was overwhelming, some questioned her tactics.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Police Federation members listen to a speech by Theresa May in 2011. Photograph: Graham Turner

Watching from the wings as she spoke, Steve White – a serving officer, then running for chair of the federation – fished out his mobile. “I sent a text to my wife and it just said, ‘Oh shit,’” he recalled. “Which sums up how I felt.” He was running as a reformist, and May had not warned him of what she was going to say. Now her words risked creating a backlash.

Shami Chakrabarti, also on the platform, felt it was a phony fight picked for cameras. “I actually felt sick; it was like going to somebody’s house and spitting on them,” she said. “If you’re trying to engineer change in the police, that’s not the way to do it.” To blame police for abusing their powers without accepting responsibility for distributing those powers is, she said, “to draft a blank cheque and blame the people who cashed it”. It sits oddly, too, with May’s backing for new counter-terrorism powers, which are open to similar abuse.

But for Nick Herbert, May’s former policing minister, it was a key moment not only for the politics of austerity – May had twisted the knife by noting crime had fallen, not risen, as police budgets were cut – but for public trust. “We were told the whole time the only thing that’s really wrong with policing is politicians. But if you look at the whole series of things that are not right with policing, which have led to this disconnect with the public – as a party, we did see that.” One reason few MPs doubt May’s personal commitment to the stalled public inquiry into child abuse is her unsqueamish turning over of stones predecessors avoided, including the ordering of an inquiry into longstanding allegations of police corruption and Fleet Street collusion surrounding the 1987 murder of private detective Daniel Morgan.

And in Bournemouth, she undoubtedly struck a public chord. Her “positivity ratings”, YouGov’s index of how favourably a public figure is talked and written about, spiked that week. Westminster took note. May had once again turned her natural coolness, and outsider status as a woman, to her advantage.

“She’s made a distinctive identity for herself – this rather cool, tough figure – that must have been in many ways influenced by Margaret Thatcher. Being seen as a strong woman is a powerful brand,” said a longstanding colleague. Like Thatcher, May has increasingly learned to project that brand right down to her clothes: severe black suits with flamingo-pink fingernails, or a trouser suit from the irrepressibly punk Vivienne Westwood. But hers is not the only powerful Tory brand.

***

Shortly after the Paris attacks in January, Jewish community leaders gathered on a cool, grey Sunday morning in London to remember the dead. Boris Johnson sent a message to be read in his absence. But May was there in person, as the rabbi sang Hebrew prayers under a sky-blue ceiling, to hear the fear and the anger; and to explain what would be done.

What separates these two bitter rivals is less ideology than character. If May has what one former senior civil servant called “your classic 2:1 mind” – utterly commanding the brief, but not given to sideways leaps of genius – Johnson is the brilliant but erratic choice. (Days after missing the remembrance service Johnson was photographed apparently endorsing the struggle against terrorism by lying in a field in northern Iraq, holding an AK-47.) Both are instinctive social liberals, with little time for the reactionary agenda of Nigel Farage, yet both know that appealing to voters tempted by Ukip could be the key to winning any Tory leadership contest held now. The question may be who cracks first.

It is deeply ingrained in May that harping on about Europe and immigration repels more voters than it attracts. But more than that, neither issue personally moves her much. She is neither Europhile nor Europhobe, but characteristically in the middle. Although she will not say which side she would support in an EU referendum – a key issue for many Tories – the betting is that with some prospect of EU reform she would prefer Britain to stay in. (Johnson, meanwhile, flirts publicly with the “outers”.) And while in public she stubbornly defends the government’s immigration target, in private her views are more nuanced. “She’s just not that interested in immigration,” said a well-placed source. “She’s deeply committed to the police reforms. That’s her baby.” She was, said another Home Office insider, secretly “mortified” by the “Go Home” vans authorised by her department to tour London telling illegal immigrants to leave. On the Maidenhead dinner party circuit, Tory bigwigs complain that she is too soft.

But recently she has edged rightwards. First came what the ex-universities minister David Willetts called a “mean spirited and inward-looking” proposal, outlined in December, to cut immigration by making foreign students leave the country immediately after they graduate. Then last month she was spotted lunching with ex-defence secretary Liam Fox, a former leadership contender and rightwinger with whom she has lately struck up a useful friendship. After three years out of office, Fox sees the attraction of throwing his lot in with May: “He’s in danger of becoming yesterday’s man: so how does he keep himself near to the top? He thinks wherever Theresa ends up, even if she doesn’t win, she’s in the top three,” said an MP who has discussed the alliance with Fox’s camp. In return, he brings followers she may need.

The lesson of last September’s close shave in Scotland is never to underestimate David Cameron. After the election, Johnson and May could well end up scrapping for jobs in his new cabinet, rather than for his vacant crown. But if it comes to it, May has her cheerleaders – often women she served with or mentored, such as Maria Miller, who took over the cabinet equalities brief from her, or Cheryl Gillan, the former Welsh secretary. “There are a lot of women who owe her: all those coffees she gave them in the tearoom when nobody else wanted to know,” said a friend. What May lacks, however, is a parliamentary power base like that operated by her old enemy Michael Gove, and his good friend George Osborne.

“Michael and Theresa are full-on at war and if Labour wasn’t so crap this would be getting very interesting,” said another MP close to May. It was Gove who rebuked her for disloyalty in front of the whole cabinet when speculation about her ambitions first surfaced in 2013. May’s friends suspect the Gove camp of leaking damaging snippets about her to the Murdoch press. (If the Mail titles are pro-May then Gove, a former Times journalist, and Osborne seemingly have News International sewn up). Osborne’s publicly gushing praise for Johnson, meanwhile, suggests that the interests of these three men may be converging. Anyone, apparently, but May.

There is an irresistible narrative to all this, the age-old story of posh boys closing ranks against a woman – and a party still clinging to its nasty streak. But that is too neat to be true.

If Johnson beats her, it will not be because he is a man, but because he has the electoral Midas touch. And May is no victim. She has fought for causes she strongly believed in, turning them mainstream; to paraphrase Hillary Clinton, if she doesn’t break the glass ceiling she will have cracked it enough to help the next woman. She has sought, and won, not adoration but respect. A decade ago, people would have laughed at the idea of May for leader. Who’s laughing now?

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