Harry Cole

‘The claws are never far away’: inside the court of Theresa May

There are plenty who have been left bruised by May’s decade and a half at the top of the Conservative party, but even her worst enemies concede that the woman who is to become the next Prime Minister has shown a remarkable durability in high office. She’s the longest-serving Home Secretary in half a century, and has made a success of what’s very often a career-ending job.

A long-retired party grandee recalls May, then newly elected to Parliament, approaching him in 1997 to ask what she must do to succeed. ‘Ignore the little things,’ he replied. It’s advice that her critics reckon she has firmly ignored ever since. When he resigned as a Home Office minister, the eccentric Liberal Democrat Norman Baker described trying to work under May as ‘walking through mud’. There are Conservatives, too, including ones in the cabinet, who accuse May of being a territorial micromanager. But the wrath of her colleagues has only increased her standing with grassroots Tories.

‘She’s a boxer,’ says a Home Office mandarin. ‘She’s got her gloves up all the time. Not much gets through. Always defensive.’ ‘Any special adviser in Whitehall who didn’t make it their business to know exactly what is going on in their department is negligent,’ contends Nick Timothy, a long-term aide and friend. ‘She wants to know what’s going on and wants to have a handle on things.’

But the body count is high: Pauline Neville-Jones, the former spook turned security minister, lasted only a year in May’s Home Office. Ken Clarke felt her sharp claws when she publicly declared, ‘I lock them up, and he lets them out.’ No serious cabinet split in the past four years has had May’s name far from it and, as Michael Gove found out, she is very good at defending her territory.

Ask anyone about May and you get the usual ‘Merkel of Maidenhead’ stuff; she is famed for her kitten heels and penchant for expensive, punchy jackets and Vivienne Westwood tartan suits.

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