The last few days I’ve been asking myself the same question. If I knew Theresa May would end up Prime Minister, when I worked as a political researcher for her nearly fifteen years ago when she was in the Shadow Cabinet, would I have quit politics after only six months?
Yes, I still think I would have. I was temperamentally unsuited to the Westminster world. Quite aside from all the ego and ambition running amok, I soon realized I didn’t want to become an MP and my idea of heaven hardly comprises a room full of civil servants.
Yet Theresa May always struck me as something of a political outlier herself. Unlike almost every other politician I worked for, or subsequently got to know, she seemed uninterested in burnishing her image and playing the Westminster game.
It’s fast becoming a cliché that for David Cameron’s successor, it was the work that mattered. That doesn’t make it any less true.
Whether it’s maintaining the esteem of the press, or ascending the political ladder, the things that consume most politicians (Jacob Rees-Mogg and Labour’s Jonathan Ashworth are other notable exceptions) – and therefore dominate the lives of their staff – never impacted my duties for her.
You always knew where you stood with Theresa May. Unfortunately, I worked for her and Eric Pickles in the Shadow Transport Department when Tony Blair’s New Labour was entering the end of its golden age and four years before David Cameron became leader.
By the end of many evenings I myself was on shakier footing, having drunk way too much with colleagues to ensure my reputation wasn’t shredded as another miserable day was dissected under the hapless leadership of Iain Duncan Smith.
I got to know lots of people during my time in politics. But, looking back, the tightest bond I formed was with the Marquis of Granby, the pub found a stone’s throw away from the Conservative Central Office (CCO).
We were a quirky bunch of backroom toilers at the Conservative Research Department (CCO was nicknamed Château Despair).
There was Dave, who worked for Shadow Chancellor Michael Howard, a Millwall football fan seemingly in a permanent sulk after his idol Michael Portillo failed to get elected leader.
James handled the education brief, a smooth man on the make who in time would impress David Cameron to the extent that he now sits in the House of Lords; and Tara, then in broadcast PR, who would often ask me, “What do you know that I don’t?”
It was music to my ears, since, while Theresa May might choose a subscription to Vogue as her luxury item on Desert Island Discs, as she herself says, she does not do gossip.
May was then Shadow Transport and Local Government Secretary, a career phase that tends to get glossed over now – her bio is often fast-forwarded to her subsequent promotion to Party Chairman in July 2002 and her controversially telling the Conservative Party Conference that they were the “nasty party”.
But, at the time, the transport brief was intense. Days before I began working for May and Eric Pickles, the Shadow Transport Minister in October 2001, Labour’s Transport supremo Stephen Byers had put Railtrack – the private company that controlled Britain’s rail network – into administration, effectively re-nationalizing train operations.
50,000 Railtrack shareholders were understandably enraged by the government arbitrarily winding down the company, and the Shadow Transport team needed to figure out what we would replace Railtrack with. As a 23-year-old parliamentary novice who wanted to be in journalism, not politics, my instinctive reaction was “How the hell would I know?”
I worked long days, feeling like a rookie pyrotechnic helping to organize a lavish fireworks display. But May was always methodical, patient and clear-sighted, and never once lost her temper at my inexperience and ineptitude. She would call to say thanks if she used my research in the Commons or in an interview.
Meetings would often begin with a male MP in the Shadow Transport team making a joke about her shoes (May has a penchant for wearing leopard print kitten heels). She would awkwardly laugh and then proceed straight to business.
I’d speak often with Eric Pickles about films or the political scene, but May went out of her way not to reveal her views beyond the matter in hand.
Once, back in 2002, I recall her speculating that if she ever had the opportunity she would like to drastically reform the 1922 Committee – which is ironic since the party’s key backbench committee formally confirmed her as Prime Minister once Andrea Leadsom withdrew from the leadership race.
She now has the chance to do just that but surely has more pressing matters in her inbox.
I keep reading how May has no power base. A former colleague of BBC Director-General Tony Hall once told me his erstwhile boss “gives good mate”. May certainly doesn’t “give good mate”.
But it’s revealing that two of her keenest allies – Chris Grayling and Eric Pickles – were also part of the Shadow Transport team back then and that Tom Winsor, the former rail regulator who May got to know during the Railtrack debacle, was appointed Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary after she became Home Secretary.
It’s just as well that Theresa May didn’t place too much outward importance on her reputation, since, when I was working for her, the political stock of both her and Eric Pickles was perceived by those around them – incorrectly as it turned out – to be falling.
One colleague even advised me in the Marquis of Granby – where else? – to try to move departments. He wound up becoming an MP in 2010 and an early public supporter of May’s campaign to be Prime Minister.
Yet the negative Tory murmurs about May were reflected in the media. Take what happened when Stephen Byers – then a Blairite rising star, now someone who probably has trouble recognizing himself in the mirror – was under pressure for lying about the complete dysfunction of his transport department in February 2002.
Byers admitted in parliament to having been misleading over his efforts to force out his communications chief Martin Sixsmith (later played by Steve Coogan in the film Philomena).
May was flummoxed by his sudden disclosure and failed to land the killer blow. The next day’s press was brutal. The Guardian described her parliamentary performance as “lackluster” while the Evening Standard said she had “made a hash of leading the interrogation”.
At the meeting I attended the next day, May was dejected and lamented that she couldn’t have accused Byers of lying in the House of Commons. (Byers fessed up to lying in 2005 long after the episode had long left political imaginations.)
This episode is now buried in the mists of time but it speaks to the fact that May is not a brilliant spontaneous parliamentary performer. Indeed it was revealing that during TV interviews following her victory in the Conservative Party leadership contest (before Andrea Leadsom pulled out of the race), she seemed to have memorized her written victory statement. She will have to get better at thinking on her feet.
But the political establishment that initially viewed her with suspicion has grown begrudgingly to rate her talents.
Look at political commentator and former Spectator editor Matthew D’Ancona who raged at David Cameron appointing her as Home Secretary in 2010: “How the hell did we end up with Theresa May as Home Secretary?” he asked in GQ.
“Uselessness is rarely discussed openly nowadays: it is the Big U, just as cancer used to be the Big C.” D’Ancona later predicted in GQ that May would end up PM and yesterday when I asked him whether he stood by his rant, he admitted: “Like May herself, I have been on a journey.”
The profiles I have read of Theresa May that resonate the most with the person I knew are from Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian and Harry Cole in The Spectator.
Judging from what they and others have written, May now seems to be much more up for a fight (in 2002 her transport press officer was so terrible she barely knew more than who was in power. It was the second time she had worked with her but, to the best of my knowledge, May did nothing to try and have her replaced.)
If the reports are true, May has developed an inclination to micro-manage, perhaps something she views as an inevitability of being in office rather than opposition.
Certainly she left the team free to work on the first part of the new shadow transport policy in March 2002.
We unveiled the policy in Westminster at a media briefing but, disastrously, only one journalist showed up. Back in the office I informed Henry MacCrory, then a senior Tory press officer, the identity of the sole journalist who had come to hear our policy.
Came the reply: “He is a notorious drunk and was probably too pissed to know what was under discussion. Don’t expect any coverage.”
There was only so much failing to solve the Railtrack by day and going off the rails by night that I could take. I left for the Daily Mail (happily Nick Timothy, my recommendation for my successor, got the job and remains with May to this day.)
A few months later, Byers did indeed quit as Transport Secretary and May got promoted to Party Chairman.
I bumped into Theresa May’s secretary a few months after leaving politics. Surprisingly she told me that May had said to her that she missed my research.
Writing this makes me wish I’d made more of an effort to keep in touch with her but when you work in such a straightforward way for someone, there is minimal room for any social angle once your paths diverge.
Even though, as Heat Street has pointed out, May’s record as Home Secretary was mixed, she will swiftly get on with being Prime Minister and I believe her when she says post-Brexit she’ll get the UK out of the European Union.
May seems less Jason Bourne and more Nicky Parsons, the covert agent played by Julia Stiles. But given supreme showman Boris Johnson just failed to become Prime Minister, her experienced sobriety suits the mood of the nation – even though she happens not to be a Brexiteer.
Contrasting much of the disingenuous political leadership Britain has endured over the past quarter of a century, I think May will be a sincere PM and that her purposes will be as honest as I considered they were to be when I was researching for her all those years ago at Château Despair.
We’ll soon find out.