The Guardian:

[Contrary to the Douzari analysis by the clueless punters on this site she is no Trumpette]

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.”

Less charitable colleagues argue that this belief in her personal fitness to understand, and deliver, what the public wants is itself a kind of vanity.

Aside from the august institution that is the Tory party, and the “precious union”, as she calls it, it can be hard to say what May believes in. Her former chief of staff Nick Timothy was an enthusiastic advocate of a kind of red Toryism.
 

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