Britain | The Conservative leadership

The battle for Downing Street

Theresa May now seems the most likely person to lead the Tories, and the country, but she will have to fend off a pro-Brexit rival

SOMETIMES a day seems a long time in Britain’s currently febrile politics. This week the leader of the UK Independence Party, Nigel Farage, resigned (for a third time), after achieving the party’s goal of winning the June 23rd referendum on leaving the European Union. The Labour Party continued its drawn-out suicide course (see article). And the race began to succeed David Cameron as Conservative leader and prime minister.

The favourite is the home secretary, Theresa May. Despite backing the losing Remain side in the referendum, she won the support of 165 Tory MPs, half the total, in the first round of voting on July 5th. The second round was held as we went to press. After an extraordinary bout of mutually assured destruction among Brexiteers had eliminated Boris Johnson, a former mayor of London, it seemed likely that Mrs May’s rival would be Andrea Leadsom, the energy minister. Michael Gove, the justice secretary, was still hoping to edge past her.

The final choice will be made by a postal ballot of the 150,000-odd Tory party members, with the result coming on September 9th. The race is hard to call because, although Mrs May has a clear lead among MPs, party members may prefer a Brexiteer. Since no candidate wants a general election, the winner will become Britain’s next prime minister.

In the space of just a few weeks Mrs May has become the preferred choice of the Tory establishment. George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, once held that mantle. But his fervent and at times over-the-top campaigning for Remain blew up his chances. Other Remainers such as Stephen Crabb, the work and pensions secretary, were deemed unready. In contrast, Mrs May’s backing for Remain was cautious and understated, and her previous reputation was as a Eurosceptic. She now says that “Brexit means Brexit”.

She is seen as brisk and efficient, but not especially warm. She is not a gregarious type or a frequenter of the House of Commons tea room, still less of its bars. Unlike Mr Cameron and lots of Tory MPs, she is state-educated, though like so many she is an Oxford graduate (in geography). Like Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, she is the daughter of a church pastor. Her only frivolity is her famous leopard-print shoes.

Her political career has been similarly unflashy. When she was picked to chair the Conservative Party in 2002, she told the party conference that too many voters saw the Tories as “plain unattractive” and the “nasty party”. She supported Mr Cameron’s later efforts to detoxify and modernise the party’s image. She now wants “a country that truly works for everyone”.

What has really made her name is her time as home secretary since May 2010. The Home Office is a notorious graveyard for political careers, and it often sees rapid turnover. Yet in August Mrs May will become the longest-serving home secretary since the 19th century. No politician since Palmerston in 1855 has moved directly from home secretary to prime minister. But Mrs May’s reputation has been enhanced by her stint. She has managed the rare combination of social progressivism (she was an early backer, by Conservative standards, of same-sex marriage) with a hard line on law and order. Nor has she been afraid to challenge vested interests, including the police. She will not have minded much when Kenneth Clarke, a Tory grandee who is a former home secretary as well as chancellor, was picked up on a microphone this week calling her a “bloody difficult woman”.

Mrs May has also argued strongly against excessive immigration, for instance in a jarringly rabid speech to the 2015 Tory party conference. She has said she wants to take Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights, though she has dropped that goal in her leadership campaign. But her broader views have been coloured by her experience of the value of co-operation with other European countries on crime and the fight against terrorism. In her pro-Remain speech in April, she stressed the security case for continuing membership of the EU. And in 2014, when she was negotiating a British opt-out from EU co-operation in justice and home affairs, she was careful to opt back in to such sensible measures as the European arrest warrant.

Her biggest problem with party members will be that most of them voted for Brexit. And the strongest card of her rival will be an insistence that the forthcoming negotiations with the EU should be handled by a Brexiteer. In 2013 Mrs Leadsom said leaving the EU would be a “disaster”, but she claims her time as founder of the pro-reform Fresh Start group turned her in favour of Brexit. She stresses her status as a working mother (Mrs May has no children). Her main weakness is lack of experience (she has never been a cabinet minister); questions have also been raised over her City credentials. She is not much liked in the party, her ministerial record is patchy and, unlike with Mrs May, civil servants who have worked for her have not been impressed. Mr Gove scores better on all these counts.

Mrs Leadsom also favours getting on quickly with Brexit, promising to trigger Article 50, the legal route to it, as soon as she takes office. Mrs May, more cautiously, wants to defer this until the end of the year (see article). More than her rivals, she understands the value of full access to the EU’s single market and the trade-off that Britain may have to make between preserving this and limiting EU migration. She has had to soften her line that the status of EU nationals already in Britain should be a matter for negotiation; she now says they can stay so long as Britons abroad get reciprocal rights. But the irony she might appreciate most is that a Brexit-induced recession may now cut immigration sharply.

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "The battle for Downing Street"

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