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Following on from Jan's post, Matthew Parris writing in the Times.
Like so many whose lives have brushed with Theresa May’s, my first meeting with her left almost no impression. It was in the 1990s and she had invited me to speak at her Maidenhead Conservative association’s annual dinner. We must have spent two or three hours together, she, her husband, Philip, and I — and all that sticks in the memory is a certain stiffness (but not unfriendliness), no political conversation and a faint intimation that for her these occasions were more duty than pleasure. I’d have used the word “shy”. In this and subsequent encounters, Philip May was a quiet but always significant presence. You somehow just know — by a look, by a touch — when a partnership is real, and central to two lives. It was not surprising to see him in the Commons gallery for her tough test at PMQs yesterday.
My second encounter was more revealing. Some years ago, when she was still home secretary and (in retrospect) already dreaming of leadership, she made a tour of East Midlands activists that culminated in a big dinner in Derbyshire. She surprised many of us with a strong, if fairly empty, speech and seemed relaxed and in command. Questions from the audience were respectful and she fielded them competently. Then a woman got up from a table near the window. We all recognised Edwina Currie, who had been MP for a neighbouring constituency. Her husband is a retired senior police officer. Not long before, Mrs May had made a pugnacious speech to the Police Federation, with whom she clashed. Mrs Currie’s question was courteous but critical, suggesting that Mrs May had failed to support the police. “Well,” I thought, “May will know how to answer this one.” But she fell apart. She was like a TV presenter whose Autocue had gone on the blink. Mentally or emotionally unprepared for a hostile question from a friendly audience, she floundered. She could have tackled Mrs Currie either with diplomacy or fightback, but both failed her. I was shocked. Here was a senior cabinet minister, sometimes spoken of as a future leader, who, faced with the unforeseen, seemed entirely incapable of busking it.
Later that night she and her husband accompanied our local MP, Patrick McLoughlin, and his wife to dinner at my home. I’d feared the evening might be tense, but we fast realised that — on one condition — Mrs May was pleasant company. The condition was that you didn’t talk politics. If anyone did, a shutter came down. And I learnt that this well-mannered woman was a good hater. At the mention of a particular colleague’s name her lip curled, she made no attempt to conceal her dislike, and rather seemed to enjoy the disdain. My next encounter, during the 2017 general election campaign, was arguably the closest and I didn’t even meet her. For the BBC’s Newsnight programme I was asked to write a documentary whose working title was Who is Theresa May? Mrs May and her team would have nothing to do with it. But I did have a long and frank interview with an old university friend of hers.
She told me of the young Theresa Brasier’s method of road-testing young men in her search for the right boyfriend, even testing their knowledge of cricket. There were curious echoes here of the young Margaret Roberts’s trialling of boyfriends, not always consecutively, as described in Charles Moore’s biography of Baroness Thatcher. Here, it seemed, were two young women with an almost coldly strategic approach to the selection and pursuit of life goals. Interestingly, Mrs May’s university friend was emphatic that the young Miss Brasier had been “One Nation” in her Conservatism and suggested that she had not been a great admirer of Lady Thatcher’s rather “right-wing” politics. Nor had she much doubt that even as an undergraduate, her friend had dreamt of the top job in politics.
What kind of a person emerged from my research? To my surprise, most accounts did not greatly differ. Even to her friends she was an enigma: an enigma whose hard outer shell was easy to know and describe, but whose interior was a mystery. Nobody thought she was stupid and nobody thought she was brilliant. Everyone thought her determined. Nobody praised her powers of communication or persuasion. Nobody called her warm. Everyone admired her stamina. The picture of a single-minded, unsentimental and almost relentless woman was forming in my mind. But there was something missing. What did she want to make of her job? What, to her, was leadership for? To whom, if anyone, did she confide hopes, fears, love or affection?
I have since been learning how her Commons colleagues see her. And it’s the same old problem. What does she want? What does she think? It calls to mind the question “knock-knock — who’s there?” While some are mystified by her inscrutability, many are now exasperated. My last encounter with her was not long after she became prime minister. Being regarded as a “friendly” journalist, I was invited to Downing Street for coffee. It was appalling. I had arrived with one thought in mind: to warn her that the Tory right would never be her friends, and she should not lose the respect of Tory moderates. But instead of engaging, all I got was what sounded like extracts from old speeches. And this to an old colleague and friend. I kissed her as I left. She looked a little alarmed. But the truth is I had arrived as a supporter, and departed dismayed. Win though she did last night, hundreds of her MPs have made the same transition.
