The two women are in a Conservative Party runoff to replace Prime Minister David Cameron, who is resigning after British voters rejected his advice and chose to leave the European Union in a referendum last month.
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May and Leadsom had been due to contest a ballot of grassroots Conservative party members, with the result to be declared by September 9.
“Brexit means Brexit and we are going to make a success of it”, she said outside parliament in central London on Monday afternoon.
The Maidenhead MP, who will be Britain’s second female prime minister, said Mrs Leadsom had shown “dignity”, and also expressed her gratitude to Mr Cameron.
The comparison with Thatcher, the “Iron Lady” who governed from 1979 to 1990 and refashioned Britain in line with her free-market ideology, appeals to many Tories.
Her victory means that the complex process of extricating Britain from the European Union will be led by someone from the losing side of the acrimonious referendum campaign.
May needs to navigate between more pragmatic states like Germany, Sweden, Ireland and the Netherlands that would want to maintain strong trading ties with the United Kingdom, and others like Belgium and France that are likely to want to make an example out of Britain.
The 59-year-old became the leader in waiting when her only rival withdrew from the race, citing a need for national stability and continuity following the vote. Cameron, who has governed since May 2010, said he would offer his resignation to Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace on Wednesday after attending a final session of Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons.
Leadsom, 53, never served in cabinet and was barely known to the British public until she emerged as a prominent voice in the successful Leave campaign.
And she said she wanted to reunite the nation and “give a strong new positive vision for the future of our country… that works not for the privileged view but that works for everyone of us”.
She says the country needs certainty, not a nine-week leadership race. She acknowledged that Mrs May had secured much greater backing in a vote of Conservative members of parliament last week.
“We now need a new prime minister in place as soon as possible”, Leadsom said.
Theresa May’s speech in Birmingham was a daring one for a candidate in the Conservative leadership election.
May was officially named Conservative Party leader and successor to Cameron “with immediate effect” Monday, said Graham Brady, chair of the 1922 Committee, a collection of Conservative members of Parliament key to electing the party leader. The FTSE 250 index of mid-sized companies rose 3.27 percent.
Sterling jumped 1% to as high as 1.32 U.S. dollars at one stage, helping claw back some of the recent dramatic falls seen since the Brexit vote – which saw the pound hit 31-year lows against the greenback.
George Osborne has long angled to become Foreign Secretary when he left the Treasury, and Ladbrokes has him as the strong favourite to land the job. She will have to balance access to the EU’s single market, which the economy has come to rely on, with immigration controls that the “leave” campaign promised. Her allies accused May supporters of trying to undermine Leadsom.
Two of the leading Brexiteers, former London Mayor Boris Johnson and Justice Secretary Michael Gove, were briefly Conservative leadership contenders, and May could show magnanimity by putting them in her Cabinet.
She will say that “fighting these injustices is not enough”, and add: “If you’re from a working-class family, life is just much harder than many people in politics realise”. She also faced questions over claims in her resume about her previous career in finance.
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Her biggest challenge by far will be managing Britain’s departure from the European Union. She could have talked about the police, tackling gang violence, combatting drug abuse, equal rights, or generally how to ensure that law-abiding Britons did not live fear of criminals But she did not. “I am now putting the whole of the party on a general election footing”, he said.
