Theresa may

Theresa May has been keen to stress that she doesn’t want this country or her government to be defined by Brexit. In her first week as Prime Minister, she has moved quickly to show that she isn’t going to be continuity Cameron. Her reshuffle made the cabinet less posh and more suburban than her predecessor’s. She has suggested that grammar schools might be on the way back, and national-interest tests could be introduced for foreign takeovers. Things are changing fast. May — and those around her — are modernisers. It’s just that they feel the previous modernisation was wrong. In May’s opinion, the Cameroons spent too much time trying to

What we know for sure about our secretive new PM is that she uses her clothes as a bush-telegraph. What did the tom-toms tell us? Mrs May was done up like an Evesham house-wife going to dinner with her husband’s boss in about 1950. Neat hair. Navy blue jacket. White top underneath. A rope of fake pearls and just a hint of neck. Across the shires the faithful will have cheered this display of Brief Encounter elegance. She was good at the despatch box, nervous certainly, sometimes stumbling over her words. But she produced a forceful impression of competence and compassion. Hard head. Soft heart. She has ‘grip’ as they

Theresa May’s first Cabinet meeting wasn’t accompanied by the kind of eye-catching announcement you would have expected from Tony Blair or David Cameron. Instead, the big news is that the new Prime Minister will chair three Cabinet committees on the economy and industrial strategy, exiting the European Union, international trade and social reform. This does rather underline her reputation for being someone who doesn’t like delegating, as well as her interest in the serious machinery of government, rather than media gimmicks. She then underlined her serious reputation further by welcoming colleagues to the coffin-shaped table in Downing Street by saying the following: ‘When I launched my leadership campaign, I said

Theresa May’s new government gets to work today, and first to face the heat of the Chamber was the Communities and Local Government frontbench. Unfortunately, the Chamber turned out to be rather cool, as very few Labour MPs had managed to turn up, giving Sajid Javid and his team a rather gentler introduction to their new jobs. One of them, Andrew Percy, told the Chamber that ‘I share the House’s surprise!’ on this appointment as he rose to take his first question. But largely the questions that were asked were not a surprise for the frontbench. Some Tory MPs were anxious for a renewed commitment from the new ministers to

A few weeks ago, I wrote a Spectator cover story about David Cameron’s purge of the posh. My peg was a new wheeze from the Cameroons whereby prospective employees should be asked not just where they went to university, but about their childhood and parents’ assets etc. The idea was to make sure that too many posh people didn’t make it to the top. Sinister, I argued, and not meritocratic. Judging people on their merits means not marking them down for being poor or posh. Inverted snobbery is still bigotry, and ought to be deplored as such. And yet the government was proposing rolling it out, first with the civil service and then…. …the government hopes other

Theresa May has demonstrated this week that she isn’t interested in being continuity Cameron. Her reshuffle was, as I say in The Sun, a brutal change up from the previous Cabinet and she has shown that she is determined to take on the party of the rich tag in a way that David Cameron never could. In this reshuffle, May hasn’t bothered to disguise who her friends are and, just as importantly, who are her enemies. She was ‘wintery but courteous’ when she sacked people. Any Prime Minister who sacks more ministers than the size of her majority is taking a risk. Some of those who she sacked are already

Theresa May has told us repeatedly that ‘Brexit means Brexit’ and Philip Hammond has been at it too: just in case you weren’t aware, Brexit really does mean Brexit. Whilst it’s a catchphrase which is meant to reassure those who want Britain to leave the EU (and those who don’t, but respect the outcome of the vote), it’s actually pretty vapid. And on her trip up to Scotland today, the PM may have shown how her phrase could easily unravel. Theresa May said she was ‘very clear’ about involving the Scottish government in the Brexit negotiations and that she was eager to ‘get the best possible deal for the entire