The latest developments in the Brexit would have led many Prime Ministers to leave. What makes Theresa May different?
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Supporters of Theresa May put her extraordinary inflexibility in the face of new facts down to two things: her fabled resilience, and her deeply ingrained determination not to split the Conservative party.
Chris Wilkins, who worked for the prime minister in Downing Street, including drafting key speeches, says: “I often reflect on my time there and think I underestimated the extent to which she is a dyed-in-the-wool Conservative. She is absolutely steeped in the party.”
When Jacob Rees-Mogg invoked the Victorian prime minister Robert Peel last year to warn May against relying on Labour votes to pass her Brexit deal, he knew the analogy would hit home. Peel split his party over the corn laws, and banished them from power for a generation as a result.
Wilkins says May is also sustained by a sense that she is the only grown-up in the room; a serious politician executing what she repeatedly calls “the will of the people”, rather than posturing like the former public schoolboys she trounced in the Tory leadership race.
“She has this phrase: ‘Politics is not a game.’ That is the Theresa May worldview,” he says.
As the prime minister herself put it during her leadership speech: “I don’t tour the television studios. I don’t gossip about people over lunch. I don’t go drinking in parliament’s bars. I don’t often wear my heart on my sleeve. I just get on with the job in front of me.”
These past months have brought together the stubborn grit that is May’s most visible character trait, with that overriding determination not to be the leader who splits the Tories – along with a firm belief that the public wants politicians to “deliver Brexit” and control immigration – and she’s the woman to do it.
So perhaps it should be no surprise that May’s reaction to the resounding rejection of her Brexit deal by MPs from every party was, just like after her general election humiliation, “Now let’s get to work”.
