Theresa May: minister with a mind of her own

It's been a tough week for the Tories – but one person who has shone is the home secretary, thwarting a US extradition bid. She's built a reputation for steely resolve. Will this very private woman now leave her fellow MPs standing?
 Theresa May
Home secretary Theresa May. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

People used to wonder whether Theresa May was tough enough to be home secretary. But in the week Andrew Mitchell buckled and bowed out and George Osborne was caught travelling with the wrong train ticket, May's reputation has risen to new heights. As the Tories struggle to escape being seen as a bunch of arrogant public school boys who imagine they can insult police officers and ticket inspectors with impunity, May's political persona suddenly looks very attractive.

In place of a swaggering born-to-rule contempt for lesser mortals, the home secretary has shown a steely determination to defend a Briton of humble origins, namely the computer hacker Gary McKinnon, whom she saved from being extradited to the United States. The Americans are furious about this. They take a dim view of McKinnon's activities, which included hacking into a large number of their military computers, and they were confident that May was going to hand him over. Perhaps they should have studied more carefully an earlier episode in May's career, when she first showed her willingness to defy powerful interests.

On that previous occasion, May's target was her own party. In her speech as Tory chairman to the party conference held in Bournemouth in the autumn of 2002, she told Conservatives: "Twice we went to the country unchanged, unrepentant, just plain unattractive. And twice we got slaughtered. Soldiering on to the next election without radical, fundamental change is simply not an option." She urged the Tories to face the fact that they were seen as "the nasty party" and to commit themselves to looking like 21st-century Britain instead of hankering after "some mythical place called Middle England" and descending into "Punch and Judy politics", "glib moralising" and "hypocritical finger-wagging".

This speech caused enormous and lasting resentment. Even today there are Tories who "can never forgive her for that nonsense", as one of them put it to me. May stood accused of having "done a Gerald Ratner": of having rubbished her own brand. But she came through this storm of criticism – and another following serious problems with border control last Autumn – without buckling and today it is Mitchell and Osborne, not May, who are accused of damaging the Tory brand. How Ed Miliband delighted, during prime minister's questions last Wednesday, in pointing out that Mitchell, after abusing a police officer at the Downing Street gates, went off to dine at the Carlton Club, an institution redolent of traditional conservatism.

May would be most unlikely to have done either of these things. Although determined to reform the police, she does not go around swearing at individual officers and she is certainly not a fan of the Carlton Club. As party chairman, she refused to take up the honorary membership of the club that was offered to her. More recently, the website Conservative Home asked, as one of a series of short questions designed to reveal what kind of Tory she is, whether she would prefer to go for a night out at "the Carlton Club or Stringfellows"?

The home secretary replied: "Oh come on! I've got, I've got [laughter] objections to Stringfellows as the minister for women and equalities [at that time another of her ministerial responsibilities] and I'm afraid the Carlton Club, hmm. My night out would be with my husband, wherever he chose to take me."

This refusal to allow herself to be pigeonholed is characteristic. In the same interview, she was asked which book she would prefer to read – Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France or Louise Bagshawe's Desire: a choice between one of the greatest works of conservatism and a piece of chick-lit by a woman who has since changed her name to Louise Mensch. May just replied: "I wouldn't read either of them, sorry."

Many people have testified that lunch or dinner with May can be a sadly unrewarding experience. "It was hard to get a word out of her," one Tory said. She does not gossip or leak or betray any desire to discuss political ideas. A Tory woman said of May: "She's not at all unpleasant. She's just not cosy." When this woman described herself as "a good friend" of May's, another Tory woman retorted: "Yes, but would you discuss having your legs waxed with her?"

In a recent interview, which was adorned with photographs of her as a child, so was presumably meant to reveal more about her, May said: "I am a practising member of the Church of England, a vicar's daughter." Her father, the Reverend Hubert Brasier, was killed in a car accident just after May left university, but again, she vouchsafes no details, a reticence that would not be shown by most politicians.

May was born in 1956 and educated at Holton Park girls' grammar school, at Wheatley in Oxfordshire, which became Wheatley Park comprehensive school in her last year. She read geography at Oxford, where Benazir Bhutto (a future prime minister of Pakistan, assassinated in 2007) introduced May to her future husband, Philip May: "I hate to say this, but it was at an Oxford University Conservative Association disco… this is wild stuff. He was a good debater and Benazir had got to know him through that."

After leaving Oxford, May worked for a time at the Bank of England. She became a councillor in south London and fought two parliamentary seats before winning Maidenhead in 1997. All this sounds rather humdrum, but at Westminster her ability to run things was soon recognised. In 1999, she became the first of the 1997 intake to be appointed to the shadow cabinet.

But although respected by Tory party managers as a safe pair of hands, and one of the few competent women in the parliamentary party, it cannot be said she possessed the linguistic gifts to make a wider reputation in opposition. Nor did she seem anxious to cultivate a broad range of contacts. Unlike many politicians, she does not spend her time trying to be loved or building a power base. On many evenings, she could be seen having dinner with her husband, who is a banker. They have been married for 32 years and have no children.

It was perhaps to avert the danger of being regarded as unbearably dull that May began to wear exceptionally smart shoes. But although her footwear gave journalists something to write about, it also suggested to ignorant observers that May might be a rather empty-headed person, who cared only about amassing a large collection of shoes.

This prejudice has been dispelled by her tenure since 2010 of the Home Office. The department is a perilous one, which many politicians have left under a cloud. May has thrived there. As David Ruffley, a Tory who, like May was first elected in 1997 and who knows the Home Office from having worked there before that as Ken Clarke's special adviser, put it: "She has developed a reputation for being a very tough operator and an incredibly successful Whitehall warrior. She has not only got Home Office civil servants to bow to her will, but has fought her corner incredibly effectively against other cabinet ministers such as Vince Cable."

May has pressed forward with two main projects: curbing immigration and reforming the police. It is not yet possible to say whether she will achieve either objective, but on her own back-benches she is respected for making a good start. On the police front, her appointment of Tom Winsor to produce a rigorous review of pay and conditions, and then to serve as the first non-policeman ever to be made chief inspector of constabulary, is confirmation that she is serious. The police have not so far been able to get up a campaign against her as they did against some of her predecessors and against Mitchell.

The job of home secretary involves a number of dangerous decisions in which it is necessary to cut through a tangle of political and legal considerations in order to achieve clarity. This is what May did in the case of McKinnon. She was rewarded with praise from all sides of the House, with the notable exception of her predecessor as home secretary, Alan Johnson, who declared in a subsequent article: "The US was entitled to request and expect extradition. Theresa May has not reached a brave decision, she's taken the easy way out."

Naturally, there is speculation that May, despite or even because of her opacity, might one day be the new, more classless face the Tory party needs. Could she follow Angela Merkel, another undemonstrative daughter of a clergyman, and become her country's leader? I admit I would find this astonishing: May has the necessary toughness , but I do not see that she has the oratorical gifts. But I should at once add that it is easy to make the error of underestimating May.