What is Theresa May’s greatest weakness as she goes into conference season? The Prime Minister had such a good start to the job that it’s easy to forget that she has the same problems that David Cameron did in terms of parliamentary arithmetic and fractures in her party over Europe. For Cameron, the parliamentary arithmetic was most difficult because there was a hardened core of eurosceptics who distrusted him, and because he and George Osborne had a habit of trying to sneak half-baked policies such as huge cuts to tax credits past MPs and hope that they wouldn’t notice (which they nearly didn’t).
But for May, there is already an embittered group of Tories who not only disliked the way they and their allies were treated in the reshuffle but also the way the new Tory leader has trampled all over Cameron’s legacy by making grammar schools her first big policy battle. Those MPs, such as Nicky Morgan and Anna Soubry, are now quite happy to take to the airwaves to criticise government policy.
May needs to counter the influence of these angry Cameroons by convincing the majority of Tory MPs that new grammar schools will be quite different to the old ones, applying certain important caveats regarding tutoring and the age of selection. Those familiar with the views of most MPs think that grammar schools can get Commons approval if the government takes their valid concerns into account as soon as possible. This was something Cameron was not very good at, even when his whips were warning him for weeks of an impending rebellion.
But as I say in the magazine this week, May has a different way of operating. She doesn’t start meetings with ministers by telling them what she thinks, instead preferring to listen to their presentation and actually read their report. This could mean that she avoids an award row in the full glare of the Commons, solving it instead in meetings. But it could, in time, also mean that she doesn’t develop policy according to a clear set of beliefs and a driving passion. It is too early to tell.
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