Travels in Theresa May country

FROM 10 Downing Street, travel west. First you pass posh inner districts like Notting Hill, where David Cameron and his fashionable set plotted a liberal future for the Conservative Party early in the past decade. Then you cross working-class suburbs of the capital like Brentford and Hounslow, where trading estates intertwine with Victorian terraces. Afterwards comes Heathrow airport, a series of reservoirs, the grandeur of Windsor Castle and Eton College, and then Slough, a town so architecturally dismal that in 1937 Sir John Betjeman penned a poem beckoning “friendly bombs” to rain down on it. And then, where the concrete meets the fields, you hit Maidenhead.

This is home turf for Bagehot, who grew up in similar borderlands south of London and, when he was small and pesky, was packed off to grandparents in Littlewick Green, a village immediately west of Maidenhead. It is also Theresa May country. Since 1997 Britain’s new prime minister has been MP for the constituency encompassing the town and its surroundings. She spent her childhood across the Chiltern Hills in Wheatley, where her father was a vicar. Her seat is suburban in the truest sense: Maidenhead has always been an in-between sort of place; it exists to connect other places. It started with a toll bridge on the River Thames. Then, in the 1830s, came the Great Western Railway, which turned it into a London commuter dormitory. Now it thrives thanks to its proximity to the M4 motorway and Heathrow.

“In-between” describes Maidenhead in other ways, too. The Tudorbethan houses, the rowers on the Thames and the cricket greens make it feel like deepest England. But Maidenhead is neither nostalgic nor monocultural. It is too diverse and too close to London for that. Polish pilots who flew from the White Waltham airfield settled here after the war. In the 1950s a Sicilian newspaper advertised jobs here, attracting a large Italian contingent. Today the proliferation of global companies like Adobe, BlackBerry and Maersk draws residents from around the world.

Aesthetically, the seat is similarly interstitial. It is where the worst of London’s sprawl—post-war concrete and thundering roads scarring parts of the town centre—mingles with the English countryside at its parklike best. Murder mysteries are filmed in the surrounding villages. Amal Clooney, a hotshot human-rights lawyer, and her actor husband George live in a 17th-century manor house in Sonning, where Mrs May has her constituency home.

What about money? Maidenhead is Britain’s answer to Connecticut: “You were considered subversive if you only mowed your lawn once a week,” recalls John O’Farrell, a Labour comedian who ran against Mrs May in 2001. It contains the Fat Duck, the three-Michelin-starred restaurant epitomising Britain’s gastronomic boom. But this prosperous town also contains poor people. Its service economy has plenty of lovely jobs (software designers, bankers and insurance brokers) and plenty of lousy ones (cleaners, dish-washers and carers), but not much in the middle. House prices—one estate agent advertises a two-bedroom flat for £575,000 ($760,000)—are forcing those in the latter category into tiny dwellings and even onto the streets. Recently a group of homeless people, “Born SL6” (the local postcode), camped on the trim lawn of the town hall. A food bank feeds 200 families.

In this constituency of contrasts, one thing is uniform: everyone likes Mrs May. “She’s approachable.” “Every Friday, you see her in the town.” “She looks after us.” The new prime minister has nurtured her seat with military discipline. Even at the peak of the leadership contest she was there: opening an Alzheimer’s charity shop, visiting a DIY store and attending a church service commemorating victims of the Somme. The archives of the Maidenhead Advertiser document her involvement in every local campaign for the past 19 years. “Even her political opponents respect her,” says Martin Trepte, the editor.

At times she seems like a liberal, at others an authoritarian. She admires Margaret Thatcher but postures as an economic interventionist. She was never part of the Notting Hill set, preferring to spend her time working the “rubber chicken circuit”: speaking to silver-haired Conservatives in village halls and mid-range restaurants in small-town Britain. Thus she has acquired a reputation in Westminster for being dull and suburban. Mr Cameron claims his favourite bands include The Killers and Radiohead, for example; Mrs May goes for Abba and Frankie Valli. She holidays not on tycoons’ yachts but on hiking trips to the Alps, like Angela Merkel, another cautiously dutiful centre-right European leader to whom the comparisons draw themselves.

Go west, young Eurocrat

Mrs May’s constituency epitomises her desire for order. Maidenhead is not a backwater. It is buffeted by globalisation and change as much as anywhere. But it attracts people who want suburban calm and certainty over city buzz; who eschew the risky and unknown. Folk who, as Betjeman put it, “talk of sports and makes of cars / In various bogus-Tudor bars / And daren’t look up and see the stars”. May’s unromantically pragmatic instincts reflect this. She is not anti-globalisation (she was against Brexit). But she does want to take the edges off it, get it under control and make it neat and manageable.

European negotiators should take note. Eventually they will be locked in negotiations with the self-described “bloody difficult woman” who now inhabits 10 Downing Street. She is inscrutable, private and hard to read. But those with whom she spars could do worse than head to May country for a sense of her instincts. To an in-between land of garden centres, railway season-tickets, motorway service stations, faux-mullion windows, chain restaurants and supermarket loyalty cards. Of leather-on-willow, gin-and-jag and keep-calm-and-carry-on. To a land where Britain’s bucolic past and cosmopolitan future pass each other in the street—and avoid eye contact.

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