Britain’s second female prime minister will swiftly begin drawing up her new top team and is expected to increase the number of women in government as well as appointing a Cabinet-rank minister at the head of a new Brexit department to oversee the process of withdrawal from the EU.
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Soon afterward the palace released a photo of May curtseying to the monarch at the palace.
Leader Jeremy Corbyn has lost the support of most Labour members of Parliament and is facing a challenge from legislator Angela Eagle, in a contest with all the brutality but none of the speed of the Conservative succession.
In the interim period, the United Kingdom will not have a Prime Minister at all.
Speaking outside No 10 on Monday, he said: “She is strong, she is competent, she is more than able to provide the leadership that our country is going to need in the years ahead and she will have my full support”.
The brutal swiftness of British politics was on display Tuesday as moving vans pulled up to take David Cameron’s possessions away from 10 Downing Street and his successor posed for photos in front of her new home.
May campaigned, albeit it quietly, with Cameron for Britain to stay in the European Union and she will have to convince Eurosceptics within her party and the country at large that she has no intention of ducking out of implementing the June 23 vote to quit the bloc. “I will miss the roar of the crowd, I will miss the barbs from the opposition, but I will be willing you on”.
He even poked fun at himself, reminding legislators of a barb he directed at then-Prime Minister Tony Blair more than a decade ago: “He was the future once”.
May favored the “Remain” side during last month’s referendum campaign.
Cameron noted that he had answered 5,500 parliamentary questions in his six years in office.
Nor do the 4.1 million signatures on an online petition calling for a second Brexit vote.
Osborne and May cited Cameron’s achievements including legalizing same-sex marriage, reform of schools and an increased minimum wage – but Britain’s relationship with Europe looks set to define his legacy.
When the Conservatives won the 2010 general election, May was named home secretary, the hardest job in government, which has wrecked a string of other political careers.
May has indicated however she will not be rushed into triggering the formal procedure for Brexit. Since the vote, she has repeatedly said that “Brexit means Brexit” and her backers say she is determined to make the exit a success. The two Conservatives headed the “leave” campaign but then turned on one another in the leadership contest.
May is already under pressure to set out a timetable for Brexit from European Union leaders who warn that a delay could prolong damaging economic uncertainty.
“She will get this country back on its feet”, said 69-year-old Jim Charlesworth, a neighbour of May and her banker husband Philip. “So I think it is important to have reciprocity”.
When May arrives at Buckingham Palace, she will become the 13th leader to receive Elizabeth’s royal assent in a private ceremony that marks the moment when May succeeds Cameron as leader of Britain’s year-old Conservative government.
On Monday, she told the Daily Telegraph that she believes being a mother has “no bearing on the ability to be a PM.” .
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Mr Grayling declined to say whether he was expecting Mrs May to reward him with a senior Cabinet post, telling BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I will do whatever – if anything – she asks me to do”.
