Theresa May

Theresa May: The Largest Defeat in Parliamentary History

On 15 January 2019 the House of Commons rejected Theresa May's Brexit withdrawal agreement by 432 votes to 202 — the largest defeat any British government has ever suffered. She brought the deal back twice more and lost both times. Four months later, after the Conservatives took nine per cent of the vote and finished fifth in the European Parliament elections, she resigned, saying it was in the country's best interests for someone else to lead the effort. That sequence defines how she is remembered, and it obscures a career that was, before it, unusually substantial.

Eastbourne, Oxford, the Bank

She was born on 1 October 1956 in Eastbourne. Her schooling ran through both the state and private sectors and through both grammar and comprehensive schools — an unusual spread for a future Conservative leader, and directly relevant to a politician who would later try to expand grammar schools. She read geography at St Hugh's College, Oxford.

Her working life began in finance rather than politics: the Bank of England, then the Association for Payment Clearing Services. She was a councillor in the London Borough of Merton before winning Maidenhead in 1997, the year of Labour's landslide — a difficult election in which to arrive as a Conservative.

Eleven Years to the Front Bench

She held shadow portfolios from 1999 to 2010 and became the first woman to chair the Conservative Party. After the 2010 election she became Home Secretary, and stayed there longer than any Conservative in more than a century, while also serving as Minister for Women and Equalities from 2010 to 2012.

The Home Office is where British political careers usually end. Hers was made there. The centrepiece is the Modern Slavery Act, which received royal assent on 26 March 2015 with May as one of its primary sponsors: it consolidated trafficking and slavery offences, created an Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, allowed traffickers' assets to be seized, gave statutory defences to victims compelled into crime, and obliged large companies to publish supply-chain transparency statements. As prime minister in July 2016 she added a task force and £33.5 million in funding.

The same department produced the other half of her record. The 2012 "hostile environment" legislation conscripted the NHS, landlords, banks and employers into immigration enforcement, with the stated aim of making Britain unlivable for undocumented migrants. In 2017 the journalist Amelia Gentleman revealed that it had caught hundreds of Commonwealth citizens of the Windrush generation — people who had arrived lawfully between 1948 and 1973, many as children on a parent's passport, whose landing records the Home Office had destroyed. They lost housing, healthcare and bank accounts; some were detained and deported to countries they had not seen since childhood.

Prime Minister

David Cameron resigned after the 2016 referendum. Andrea Leadsom withdrew from the final round of the leadership contest on 11 July, and May was elected unopposed. She entered Downing Street on 13 July 2016 as Britain's second woman prime minister and the first world leader to serve with Type 1 diabetes.

Her opening reshuffle was among the most sweeping in decades: Boris Johnson to the Foreign Office, David Davis to the new Brexit department, Amber Rudd to the Home Office, Philip Hammond to the Treasury, Liz Truss as the first female Lord Chancellor.

She triggered Article 50 in March 2017 and then made the decision that destroyed her position. Calling a snap election in April to strengthen her hand, she led the Conservatives to their highest vote share since 1983 — and lost thirteen seats, falling from 330 to 317 and into a hung parliament, propped up by a confidence-and-supply agreement with the Democratic Unionist Party's ten MPs. Every subsequent Brexit negotiation was conducted from that weakened base.

The rest was attrition. Her Chequers plan fractured the cabinet. The withdrawal agreement she negotiated was defeated 432–202, then 391–242, then a third time on 29 March 2019. She survived a Conservative no-confidence vote 200–117 in December 2018 and a parliamentary one 325–306 the following month, and by then survival was all that was on offer.

The Other Record

Her premiership was crowded with events that had nothing to do with the European Union. In 2017 alone: the Westminster Bridge attack in March, the Manchester Arena bombing in May that killed twenty-two people, and the London Bridge attack in June. On 14 June 2017 the Grenfell Tower fire killed seventy-two; May said she would always regret not meeting the surviving residents immediately.

In March 2018 Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned in Salisbury with a military-grade Novichok nerve agent. May told the Commons it was highly likely Russia was responsible, expelled twenty-three Russian diplomats, and assembled an international response in which 153 Russian diplomats were expelled worldwide — the most effective diplomatic operation of her time in office.

Domestically she announced a £20 billion increase in NHS funding through the Long Term Plan, established the first Race Disparity Audit, published a 25 Year Environment Plan, and amended the Climate Change Act 2008 to commit Britain in law to net zero emissions by 2050. Unemployment fell to its lowest rate since 1975. Her proposed grammar school expansion was abandoned; her social care reform, attacked as a "dementia tax," was among the causes of the 2017 election collapse.

Why Theresa Is Called a Genius

She is not, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. She has been ranked unfavourably in historical assessments of British prime ministers and in public opinion, and her own party removed her. She was a poor campaigner, an awkward communicator, and the author of the single worst strategic decision of recent British politics in calling the 2017 election.

What can be defended is a particular kind of administrative intelligence, and it is worth stating precisely because it is so rarely the thing that makes political reputations. May's strength was mastery of departmental detail and the capacity to grind through it for years. Six years at the Home Office — longer than any Conservative in a century — is not an accident of luck; it requires an appetite for legislation, casework and institutional machinery that almost no front-line politician possesses. The Modern Slavery Act, the Race Disparity Audit and the 2050 net zero amendment are all products of that faculty: unglamorous, technical, and durable. The Salisbury response showed she could also handle an acute crisis competently and quickly.

The counter-case is the whole of 2017 to 2019, and it is heavier. The same qualities that made her a formidable departmental minister — rigidity, an unwillingness to persuade — were disastrous in a job requiring coalition-building across a divided party and country. And the hostile environment she designed at the Home Office is not a footnote to the Modern Slavery Act but its direct contradiction: the same minister who legislated to protect trafficked people built the machinery that stripped lawful Commonwealth residents of housing, healthcare and, in some cases, their liberty.

The fair verdict is that she was a serious minister and an unsuccessful prime minister, handed a task — delivering a Brexit her own parliament could not agree on — that may not have been soluble by anyone. Calling that genius overstates it. Calling it failure alone understates the record.

Legacy

She left Downing Street on 24 July 2019, having announced her departure two months earlier with the Conservative vote at nine per cent in a national election. The net zero commitment she wrote into the Climate Change Act remains binding on her successors, and the Modern Slavery Act is still the framework Britain uses. The Windrush generation is still waiting: by recent counts fewer than six per cent of eligible claimants had received compensation, and twenty-three people died before any arrived. And the three defeats of her withdrawal agreement — 432–202 among them — remain the sharpest illustration on record of what happens when a government's arithmetic and its ambitions do not match.

Achievements

• Affiliated with Bank of England and Association for Clearing Payment Services
• Educated at St Hugh's College
• Worked as politician