Aditya Chakrabortty: She’s the anti-Notting Hill prime minister
Look past BoJo (try!) and this cabinet is the anti-Notting Hill Tories. They don’t hang out in west London. They are much less socially liberal, some having opposed gay marriage. And they are also more authoritarian. Of course there are exceptions, such as the new home secretary, Amber Rudd. But look down the cabinet table, and the people you see are socially, culturally and philosophically very different from the smiley, well-moisturised, true-believing neolibs who ran the country for the past six years. Cameron’s half-baked modernisation project is history. This is a return to a provincial Toryism, one that the likes of Paul Dacre and the Daily Mail will feel very comfortable with.
Jonathan Freedland: She has shown a ruthless streak not obvious before
Predictably, the papers hailed the steel-capped toes now revealed to accompany the kitten heels. The formulation is irritating: it’s evidence of how little there is to go on with the new prime minister that headline writers keep having to bang on about her shoes. But the point was not wrong. In constructing her first cabinet, Theresa May showed a ruthless streak not obvious before.
She sacked so many colleagues, it was easier to say who had held on than who had been fired. And she sacked big beasts too, including those – George Osborne or Michael Gove – whose dispatch a more squeamish leader might have feared. It was Gladstone who said that “the first essential for a prime minister is to be a good butcher” – and May wielded the knife decisively and widely.
What’s more, as the former minister Francis Maude noted, much of the butchery seemed “personal”. She needed a senior Brexiteer at the Foreign Office. That could have been Gove, but she chose to promote Boris Johnson and dump Gove altogether. It’s likely the long, well-documented history of personal animus between them played a part. There was no love lost between May and Osborne, either.
None of this harms her, incidentally. Tories especially admire ruthlessness, equating it with strength. So May won’t dislike the headlines about her brutality. Who knows? It may even stop them talking about her footwear.
Gaby Hinsliff: She has built an inner sanctum in her own image – but has given top jobs to only seven women
The one thing nobody expected from Theresa May was a cabinet stuffed with middle-aged men. Yet the Tories’ most famous self-professed feminist yesterday surprised Westminster by giving top jobs to just seven women, only one more than David Cameron managed. The Tory sisterhood could be forgiven for feeling sore (although it’s worth watching today’s round of appointments one rung below cabinet, the pool May will draw on should one of her more volatile appointments reach a sticky end).
One clue to what’s really going on lies behind closed doors, where prime ministers hire to please themselves rather than their parties. And sure enough, four in six of the core Downing Street team unveiled last night are female, with the joint chief of staff Fiona Hill and May’s spin doctor, Katie Perrior, looking particularly influential. Where her predecessors were accused of appointing women as “window dressing” but keeping them out of the room where big decisions are taken, May seems to be doing the reverse: building an inner sanctum in her own image while filling the shop window with figures reassuring to those diehard backbench Eurosceptics who could otherwise make her life as impossible as John Major’s. Survival, perhaps, comes first for now.
Matthew d’Ancona: She’s a risk-taker, and a potentially transformative leader
Theresa May may be a compassionate Conservative, but her arrival in Downing Street has been anything but a velvet revolution. Those Tories who believed her elevation would mark a gentle transition to continuity Cameronism have been sharply disabused of that expectation.
Not only has she promoted Brexiteers who made her predecessor’s life troublesome (Liam Fox, David Davis and Boris Johnson), she has also purged her own rivals (Michael Gove and Nicky Morgan) and dismissed George Osborne from her government.
For 11 years, the Cameron-Osborne alliance has been the centre of all authority in the Conservative party, Johnson’s power base at London’s City Hall and in the media being the only significant satellite orbiting this single planet. By driving Osborne and his network from Whitehall, she has staked her claim as a “change” leader and a potentially transformative prime minister (and taken a risk).
Most politicians cease to evolve significantly after their 30s. Yet May is unrecognisably tough compared with the astonished politician who was appointed home secretary in 2010. She has defied even her own expectations, rewritten the script she was handed, and made fools of all the prophets.
Anne Perkins: This is no accidental prime minister – she’s tough and means business
Who is that new woman in Downing Street? And what has she done with that nice home counties lady who used to run the Home Office?
Theresa May’s transformation from home secretary to prime minister is almost as startling as getting out of bed one morning and finding your polite, house-trained cat is 100 times bigger than when you went to bed and has developed a low bass growl. What we know now is that May is not by any stretch of the imagination an accidental prime minister. She has wanted this job for a very long time and it is clear that she has a detailed plan, about whose political careers needs to be destroyed in order to do what she wants when she gets it.
She wants her praetorian guard round her. Those who have failed to impress as cabinet colleagues are batted out of the way. The radicals who have crossed her in the past, such as Michael Gove, lie wingless in the gutter, or are hung out to dry in exposed positions in government. Allies, among them Justine Greening (at Education) and Damian Green (at the Department for Work and Pensions) are welcomed in, while offstage her closest allies, such as her former adviser Nick Timothy, are moved into the engine room at No 10. It has been a brutal 36 hours. But you know she means business.
Kate Maltby: She’s more of a gambler and a Machiavel than we ever realised
Boris Johnson remains the big surprise. Widely assumed in London to have been exposed as a charlatan, Theresa May has calculated that he still enjoys enough political support to be worth placating. Is he there to help sell Brexit-lite to the grassroots, or just to keep him on a plane and out of trouble?
Out of the Commons from 2008 to 2015, he has never had a strong parliamentary base of support – “He doesn’t even know our names,” says one member of the 2010 intake who was asked to support him on the recent ballot. The prime minister must reckon that sending him from the backbenches to the Foreign Office will make any future leadership challenge harder, not easier. Friends of David Cameron, who originally offered Johnson the Foreign Office in return for backing the remain campaign, are furious.
May isn’t known for a willingness to take risks. Nor has she shown elsewhere a yen for forgiveness. And Johnson, after all, backed Andrea Leadsom. Camera crews will still love him, and the new job will give him plenty of opportunities to grandstand, which makes this a gamble for May. More perversely, she has long promised to cut out the backroom deals and bypass the old boys’ club. Is Theresa May more of a risk-taker than we realised? She’s certainly more of a Machiavel.
