SHE held back the tears to the very end, but in the last moments it was too much for her. After almost three gruelling years in Downing Street, Theresa May last week finally bowed to the inevitable and quit as Tory leader.
She won’t formally step aside until 7 June. But after an extraordinary week that saw a Cabinet minister resign on the eve of polling day, just as Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party was tipped to crush the Tories in European parliamentary elections, it was clear she’d be pushed if she didn’t jump.
History will remember her as the woman who tried and failed to deliver Brexit. But what legacy does the first female British Prime Minister to call herself a feminist – Margaret Thatcher famously didn’t believe in ‘women’s lib’ – leave for women, having vowed to tackle ‘burning injustices’, from the pay gap to a shortage of mental health services?
The first clue her end might be near came earlier this month, when she announced a new legal duty on local authorities to fund women’s refuges properly. May has taken a personal interest in domestic violence since she was a backbencher, introducing a new offence of coercive control – forms of emotional abuse that stop short of physical violence – when she became Home Secretary. Her return to the issue felt oddly like someone tidying up unfinished business.
In recent months, she’s also promised to tackle period poverty with free sanitary products in schools. She responded to fears that porn is warping boys’ attitude to consent by making it harder to access online and scrapping parents’ right to veto school sex education for older teenagers. She legislated to make larger firms disclose how much they pay men and women (something Grazia campaigned for) and granted MPs on maternity or paternity leave rights to vote by proxy, after outrage over the heavily pregnantLabour MP Tulip Siddiq voting in a wheelchair when she should have been having a Caesarean. Unlike Thatcher, who famously pulled up the ladder behind her, May consistently promoted women in government – so much so that at least two may now try to succeed her. She wouldn’t, she said at the Downing Street podium, be the last female Prime Minister.
Yet there are some glaring blots on her feminist record, all the same. Women in Northern Ireland still don’t have the same abortion rights as the rest of us because, two years after devolved government in Belfast collapsed, there’s still no functioning body to change the law and May wouldn’t risk going over their heads to do it. Single mothers have disproportionately suffered from the troubled introduction of Universal Credit, and while she’s pumped money into mental health care, many doctors would say it’s not enough. Meanwhile, many won’t forget the ‘hostile environment’ she promoted for immigrants that helped create the Windrush scandal, with people who’d spent their lives here wrongly told to go back to the Caribbean.
While all leaders have highs and lows, May simply got too bogged down in Brexit to deliver enough compensating highs, and many will struggle to sympathise.
But others will see in her signs of notorious ‘glass cliff’ syndrome, where women are grudgingly hired into top jobs only after everything’s gone horribly wrong, setting them up to fail while the men who originally messed it up snipe from a safe distance. When she praised the art of compromise and finding common ground in her leaving speech, it sounded uncannily like a warning to her party against picking a hard-line successor. We’re about to find out if she really was the problem all along, or if solving Brexit is actually even harder than she made it look
READ MORE: Theresa May's defining political moments
Theresa May's defining moments as Prime Minister - Grazia
1 of 13When she decided to hold a snap election
After a somewhat dubious battle for leadership following David Cameron's resignation, May attempted to stabilise her position as leader and gain a greater majority in the House of Commons by holding an early general election. Convinced the Tories would win after enjoying a double-digit lead in the polls, she risked it all in the hopes of uniting Westminster in her favour. Unfortunately for her, the Conservatives ran a poor campaign while Labour flourished with new voters, and she lost her Westminster majority altogether.
2 of 13When she ran through fields of wheat
Just before the election result was announced in 2017, Theresa May revealed the 'naughtiest' thing she ever did growing up. Did she sneak into clubs with a fake ID or smuggle vodka into a sleepover? Nope, she ran 'through fields of wheat' and upset some farmers in the process. The viral quote received the ultimate meme treatment and was even remixed into a (genuinely decent) house track.
3 of 13When she made a pact with the DUP
Without her Commons majority, Theresa May chose to create entirely unholy alliance with the DUP (whom had 10 MPs in the Commons) so she could keep the Conservatives in government. In return for their support on key votes, she promised them an extra £1bn for Northern Ireland. But of course, if you make a deal with the (pro-life, anti-LGBT and pro-death penalty) Devil, you're bound to get burned, and they have since turned their back on her by opposing her Brexit deal – the most important vote she needed to win.
4 of 13When she was handed a P45 at her first party conference
Her first address to the world as a strong and stable leader was, in a foreshadowing we never could have imagined, chaotic. Not only did she cough through the entire address, so much so that Phillip Hammond handed her a cough sweet, but she was also handed a P45 from a prankster who claimed it was from Boris Johnson. Just as you thought it couldn't get any more dramatic, the slogan 'Building a Country that Works for Everyone' that hung behind her on the wall began to fall down. We really should've seen the next two years coming then and there, to be honest.
5 of 13When she became the Maybot
In another viral meme moment for Theresa May, the former Prime Minister took to the dancefloor while on a trade mission in Cape Town, South Africa. Dancing with a group of school children on the first day of her trip, her moves were quickly posted online and swept the nation. Her robotic, wooden movements put her at the mercy of tons of online commentary, a fire that was fuelled just days later when she danced again with a group of scouts in Nairobi, Kenya. Embracing her trolling online, she joked that the Strictly Come Dancing stars should 'get in touch' for tips and even danced on stage to Abba at her second party conference in 2018.
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6 of 13When she opposed the Human Rights Act
It might have been before she became Prime Minister, but it was certainly a focal point of her appointment. After years of declaring she wanted to scrap the European Human Rights Act – you know, the one that protects our fundamental rights and freedoms and enables democracy – because she believes it makes it more difficult to deport criminals, she u-turned. Considerable Tory backlash to her stance forced her to promise she was 'not going to pursue' her efforts to pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights when she announced her bid to become Prime Minister. While it may have been the U-turn we all wanted, it became one of many that throughout the course of her leadership.
7 of 13When she suddenly decided innocent-until-proven-guilty was not a thing
She may fundamentally oppose the protection of our liberties from the European Human Rights Act, but she fully supports another EU endeavour: the one that means suspected criminals can be extradited to any EU country without any evidence. The controversial European Arrest Warrant allows for suspects to be sent to the country a supposed crime was committed with little to no proof they committed the crime.
8 of 13When she survived two no-confidence vote
While she toured the EU on a mission to salvage her crumbling deal, her peers were conspiring to remove her as leader. MPs had been sending letters of no confidence to Sir Graham Brady for days prior, and after at least 48 joined in she faced a no confidence vote. She won a comfortable majority of 83, but faced another no confidence vote the next month tabled by Jeremy Corbyn who was hoping to trigger a general election. After his motion was defeated by 325 votes to 306, May was once again secure in her leadership. Until this fateful day just five months later.
9 of 13When she awkwardly held hands with Donald Trump
On his highly controversial UK visit back in 2018, Trump was met not only by a giant Trump Baby blimp but a very welcoming Theresay May. The two were pictured holding hands on multiple occasions during the trip as they approached the press, with many questioning her closeness to such a divisive leader. She told reporters that she was helping him up and down stairs on every occasion.
10 of 13When her immigration policy punished members of the Windrush generation
… And she refused to back down. The controversial hostile environment policy, according to May, was meant to identify people living in Britain illegally – but members of the Windrush generation were wrongly entangled with devastating consequences. Commonwealth nationals living in the UK before 1973 were automatically granted citizenship without requiring a certificate or other paperwork – but thousands were left unable to prove their eligibility in later years, causing them to be denied public services and, in some cases, to be deported. Diane Abbott said that May's refusal to properly apologise for the policy had "exposed a moral failure at the heart of this rotten government. Lives have been destroyed," she said. "Theresa May should hang her head in shame."
11 of 13When she became a meme
Shoulders up, head thrown back and shaking with laughter, Theresa May couldn't contain herself during PMQs ahead of the 2017 Budget – and, naturally, her joy was immortalised into a meme mere seconds later. But what was the joke? When Jeremy Corbyn accused May of being "unclear" about whether a deal was done with Surrey Council over its cancelled tax referendum, he added: "Did she actually know what arrangement was made with Surrey County Council?" Yeah, that's it.
12 of 13When she wore some leather trousers and started a political row
Before May won the Conservative leadership election she was already making controversial headlines. And it was her choice of breeches that caused a huge stir in 2016, following an interview with the Sunday Times. The leather trousers – in "bitter chocolate", from Amanda Wakeley and allegedly costing £995 – became the centre of a row that rolled on for more than two weeks, and even saw May's invitation to a meeting about Brexit revoked, according to some reports. Former Education Secretary Nicky Morgan told The Times that the trousers had been "noticed and discussed" in Tory circles, adding,"I don't have leather trousers. I don't think I've ever spent that much on anything apart from my wedding dress." Morgan was sacked by May when she took up office in No. 10. Bitter indeed.
13 of 13When she failed to meet survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire on her visit to the site
May faced justified, heavy criticism for her failure to speak to any survivors or local people when visiting the site of the Grenfell Tower fire which killed 72 people in June 2017. She later admitted that her initial response was not good enough and said that she would "always regret" not speaking to the people affected by the tragedy. "It was a tragedy unparalleled in recent history and, although many people did incredible work during and after the fire it has long been clear that the initial response was not good enough," May wrote in the Evening Standard. "I include myself in that. While she met with firefighters and those in charge of the site following the fire, what she "did not do on that first visit," she continued, "was meet the residents and survivors who had escaped the blaze. But the residents of Grenfell Tower needed to know that those in power recognised and understood their despair. And I will always regreat that by not meeting them that day – it seemed as though I didn't care."