May is known to be cool, a tough negotiator and someone who knows her brief. More importantly, having been Home Secretary since 2010, she is well versed in the machinations of Brussels. She is respected as a good listener who looks for consensus but who holds her ground. Thatcher too was tough. Not for nothing was she known as the 'Iron Lady' famous for 'handbagging' anyone who got in her way. Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl wrote in his memoirs that Thatcher was "ice cold in pursuit of her interests" when she was negotiating the UK's budget rebate at a European summit in 1984. Theresa May is also known to be a calculating negotiator with nerves of steel. She was famous for standing in front of the Police Federation conference in 2014 and berating them for corruption. Former Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg once told a colleague: "You know, I've grown to rather like Theresa May... She's a bit of an Ice Maiden and has no small talk whatsoever — none." As May moves into Downing Street and begins the process of negotiating Britain's new relationship with the EU, the words of Margaret Thatcher will be ringing in her ears: "Certainly we want to see Europe more united and with a greater sense of common purpose. But it must be in a way which preserves the different traditions, parliamentary powers and sense of national pride in one's own country; for these have been the source of Europe's vitality through the centuries." The 59-year-old home secretary's carefully cultivated image of political dependability and unflappability appears to have made her the right person at the right time as the fallout from the UK's vote to leave the EU smashed possible rivals out of contention. Long known to have nurtured leadership hopes, Mrs May - whose friends recall her early ambition to be the UK's first female PM - could have reasonably expected to have had to wait until at least 2018 to have a shot at Downing Street. But the EU referendum which David Cameron called and lost - the year after leading the party to its first election win in 23 years - turned political certainties on their head and, as other candidates fell by the wayside after the PM's own resignation, Mrs May emerged as the "unity" candidate to succeed him. That her party should rally round her at such a time of national uncertainty is testament not only to the respect in which she is held across the party but to the fact that, in a world where political reputations can be shredded in an instant, Mrs May is the ultimate political survivor. Like Margaret Thatcher, she went to Oxford University to study and, like so many others of her generation, found that her personal and political lives soon became closely intertwined. In 1976, in her third year, she met her husband Philip, who was president of the Oxford Union, a well-known breeding ground for future political leaders. The story has it that they were introduced at a Conservative Association disco by the subsequent Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto. They married in 1980. Her university friend Pat Frankland, speaking in 2011 on a BBC Radio 4 profile of the then home secretary, said: "I cannot remember a time when she did not have political ambitions. "I well remember, at the time, that she did want to become the first woman prime minister and she was quite irritated when Margaret Thatcher got there first."
