The Making Of A Prime Minister

The churchgoing, grammar school-educated daughter of a vicar, Theresa May could hardly be more different to her predecessor at No. 10. Yet their lives have parallels, says David Runciman in his review of a new biography of the PM.

Theresa May grew up in a Cotswolds village called Church Enstone, where her father was vicar for much of the 1960s. The vicarage is within five miles of what became David Cameron’s constituency home in Witney, and is roughly the same distance from what is now Soho Farmhouse, a little piece of the metropolis that is a haven for the Chipping Norton set. Both of her grandmothers had been in service. In 2011, May described the milieu she grew up in, as a grammar school girl in the late 1960s – a vanished world of sherbert fountains, stodgy puddings and Corona, of Tommy Steele and Z Cars, a world of which Cameron would have been ignorant, growing up a decade later with The Smiths and Smash Hits.

It was at school that she became interested in politics, and by the time she was in the sixth form, she was confident enough to announce that she intended to become Britain’s first woman prime minister. At Eton, Cameron made it clear that he wanted to be prime minister one day too. Inhis case, the ambition seemed presumptuous but plausible. May’s ambition struck her contemporaries as nothing more than quaint. When Thatcher beat her to it in 1979, May was working as a junior analyst at the Bank of England and is reported to have been seriously aggrieved.