School At Home

School At Home Cameron saw off his main rivals â€" Kenneth Clarke and David Davis â€" and then offered May a job, as shadow leader of the House, which confirmed her place somewhere in the middle of the pecking order. She was good at it â€" it suited her organisational abilities â€" but she was done little good by it. She pulled back before she could step out from behind the curtain. Howard still claims to be unaware that she had wanted to put her hat in the ring. Cameron didn’t even make the shortlist, which included Philip Hammond, the current chancellor, whom May saw off in the final three. She was forty when she became an MP at the 1997 election. At the same time Cameron fought, and lost, the seat of Stafford, which the Tories had been hoping to hold before Blair blew all such hopes away. By that point May had been married to Philip for close on twenty years. They had no children, something she has since revealed was not a matter of choice. May won the plum nomination for Maidenhead ahead of three hundred other applicants, among them the 29-year-old Cameron, chancing his luck. This is one of the few occasions before late last year when he would have noticed her without her necessarily noticing him. May has difficulty containing her vitriol, which sometimes spills out in public. When Howard stepped down as leader following his general election defeat to Blair in 2005, May fully intended to stand to succeed him. She trailed the idea; she sounded out her colleagues; she prepared policy positions that went beyond her familiar briefs. Not only did Cameron beat her to it, he didn’t even notice she was putting herself forward. Both quickly established themselves as part of the leader’s inner circle, from which she was excluded. In three years, and seemingly without having to do much more than show up, Cameron had got closer to the summit than May had in seven. She may also have resented the fact that Witney, where Cameron had landed on his feet, was looking like a safer bet than Maidenhead, which had become a prime target for the resurgent Lib Dems. May had to take time out to pound the streets of her constituency, this time not only by choice but also by necessity. Meanwhile, Cameron had his feet up on the desk awaiting his moment. She found that her experience and unquestioned competence counted for little with her fellow MPs. It seems she was only able to secure the backing of a handful of them â€" Prince speculates it may have been as few as two â€" and in the end she didn’t even announce her candidacy formally. May got an opportunity to escape this straitjacket when Iain Duncan Smith made her party chairman in 2002, a decision that was widely seen at the time as smacking of desperation. She took advantage of the profile the role gave her to do two things that have helped shape her image ever since. For her first party conference as chairman, she wore a pair of leopard-print kitten heels. And in her speech, she told the assembled Tories some essential home truths. Cameron folded it into his A-list strategy, which recommended priority candidates for parliamentary seats, thereby reducing it in some people’s eyes to a PR exercise. In 2002, when still shadowing education, May had come up with the idea of ‘free schools’, designed to allow parents and teachers in the state system to escape the shackles of local government control. Cameron and his shadow education secretary, Michael Gove, soon claimed the idea as their own. The nasty party.’ Now that she is prime minister, both these moves look like essential steps on her path to the top. Back then they served to reinforce rather than to overturn the doubts many Tories had about her. Her choice of footwear confirmed the view of the sceptics that she was, in Tory-speak, ‘a colour supplement politician’. Her blunt address, however unarguable the truth it contained, struck her colleagues as simply giving Labour another stick to beat them with. In 2004 two members of the intake of 2001, Cameron and George Osborne, joined her in the shadow cabinet. Meanwhile, almost without noticing where they had come from, Cameron started to adopt positions for which May had diligently prepared the ground. What else was his modernising agenda other than an attempt to lay to rest the ‘nasty party’ tag? After her aborted leadership bid May started an organisation called Women2Win designed to redress the massive gender imbalance in the parliamentary party.