Theresa May says she will make success of Brexit as prime minister – as it happened
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Rolling coverage of the day’s political developments as they happen, including Andrea Leadsom’s exit from the Tory leadership race and Angela Eagle’s bid to lead Labour
The Scottish Conservative leader, Ruth Davidson, who has backed May from the outset, has offered the new leader her support “and the support of the entire Scottish party” as she takes on the role of prime minister. Davidson said: “The country needs certainty and stability going forward, and that’s exactly what a Theresa May premiership can provide.”
“In Mrs May, we have a prime minister who has the experience, the judgment and the leadership to start that job from day one. The dignified manner of Andrea Leadsom’s withdrawal today allows for that transition to be as smooth and as swift as possible.”
The home secretary, who is due to move into No 10 on Wednesday, said her priorities were to provide leadership through Brexit negotiations, to unite the country, and to create a positive vision of the future that gives people more control over their lives.
She set out her plans in front of Tory MPs hours after Andrea Leadsom’s withdrawal meant May had won the Conservative leadership race. To cheers, May paid tribute to Leadsom’s dignity in pulling out of the contest and praised David Cameron’s leadership of the party since 2005.
Warning that a nine-week leadership contest would destabilise the country at a critical time following the Brexit vote, Leadsom said: “Business needs certainty; a strong and unified government must move quickly to set out what an independent UK’s framework for business looks like.”
Finally beginning her campaign after weeks of speculation that she would take on Corbyn amid a revolt against him by Labour MPs, Eagle said the party needed to move beyond the factionalism and divisions of the current era.
Within minutes of Leadsom’s announcement, the index of Britain’s biggest listed companies rose to the point where it had gained more than 20% since February’s low – the technical definition of a bull market.
The Ukip MEP Jonathan Arnott has announced his candidacy for his party’s leadership, amid furore over new rules for the contest, which will block many of the party’s best-known figures from standing. The party’s ruling National Executive Committee (NEC) has said all candidates to replace Nigel Farage must have been a member for at least five years.
It means that Ukip’s only MP, Douglas Carswell, ex-MP Mark Reckless and prominent former spokeswoman Suzanne Evans, who is temporarily suspended from the party, will not be able to enter the contest.
The most intriguing political comparison between Theresa May and another major figure is arguably not with Thatcher, but with Gordon Brown, writes Gaby Hinsliff, in this meaty piece on what makes Britain’s next prime minister tick.
Brown was the last political figure dominant enough to become prime minister basically by acclamation, she notes, adding:
Two serious-minded children of religious ministers, steeped in moral purpose, both possessed of an iron need to control. May is a famously reluctant delegator, needing to know exactly what her juniors are doing and to chew over every detail of decisions – a micromanagement style she cannot hope to apply to an entire government – and like Brown, she demands unswerving loyalty. (Although unlike him, she generally won’t say behind your back what she wouldn’t say to your face.)
Yet for all her apparent stubbornness, in private, May is surprisingly open to a well-sourced argument. A former junior minister who observed her playing hardball in negotiations says she will usually do a deal in the end: “It’s not just ‘because I say so’ – if you make a good argument to Theresa, she can be willing to change her position.”
She may not be adored, but she commands admiration, a wary respect, and deep gratitude from many Tory women for what the business minister Anna Soubry calls the “proper sisterhood” that she has built inside the party. There is something fitting about the fact that over a decade after May overhauled the candidate selection system to bring more women and minority ethnic MPs up the ladder behind her, her party briefly volunteered an all-female shortlist for the top job.
We’ve been hearing from some new Labour members who signed up in anticipation of a leadership election. Here are some snippets from two of them:
Richard Moore, 45, Buckinghamshire
I joined again to stop what was increasingly feeling like a hijack of the party I’d grown up with.
I want Corbyn to go. I genuinely feel that getting elected saves lives, and lives are worth compromise. I don’t dislike Corbyn, but the business of politics is the winning of elections, and Corbyn is a bad businessman.
Kester Leek, 21, London
I officially joined the Labour party half an hour before Angela Eagle took the stage to formally announce her leadership bid, though have been a proactive Labour supporter since Jeremy Corbyn stood for the same position.
Mr Corbyn is that rarest of things in politics: an honest man – and that matters more than anything. For too long, behind-the-scenes plotting and backroom deals have been taken for granted in politics. To achieve social reform, we need to change that, and Jeremy is the man I believe is willing to do so.
Dexit? Or should that be Caxit? With the removal van expected to roll up at the back entrance of No 10 on Wednesday, the Guardian’s Rowena Mason has been told that David Cameron’s exit plan is still being worked out.
If he follows the pattern of his predecessors, he would leave No 10 alongside his family before heading to see the Queen in order to tender his resignation formally.
The most likely plan would be for him to then return to his constituency home in West Oxfordshire, as the official residence in Chequers will no longer be his to enjoy, and his pre-2010 home in Notting Hill has been rented out since then.
Larry the cat, the official Downing Street moggy, will not be moving out with him because he is the pet of the staff who work there.
Larry, the 10 Downing Street cat, is staying behind. Photograph: Steve Back / Barcroft Images
Here’s a rather different business reaction to the Theresa May news. The FTSE 100 index burst into bull market territory after she emerged as successor to David Cameron, providing a further boost to surging stocks on both sides of the Atlantic, reports the Guardian’s Larry Elliott.
Within minutes of Andrea Leadsom announcing that she was leaving the field clear for May to become leader, the index of Britain’s biggest listed companies rose to the point where it had gained more than 20% since February’s low – the technical definition of a bull market.
The FTSE 100 has now risen by 1,145 points since it hit a 2016 nadir of 5,537 on 11 February, when investors were anxious about the low oil price and threat of global recession.
Share prices had already been supported by growing speculation that the Bank of England is ready to cut interest rates from 0.5% to 0.25% on Thursday as a confidence-building measure at the first meeting of its nine-strong monetary policy committee since the Brexit result.
Theresa May’s proposals to crack down on boardroom excess and rebuild trust between corporate Britain and voters have received a mixed reaction from business leaders, the Guardian’s business team reports.
The moves, announced by the incoming prime minister just minutes before her rival, Andrea Leadsom, pulled out of the leadership contest, include allowing employee and consumer representatives to sit on company boards, and making shareholder votes on executive pay legally binding. “It is not anti-business to suggest that big business needs to change,” she said.
However, a leading figure in the retail and consumer industry, who did not want to be named, told the Guardian:
On what basis can a prime minister, who has no popular acclamation either through party members or a general election, pursue policies unconnected to the manifesto on which her party was elected?
Farewell then (for now), Andrea Leadsom. This piece by the Guardian’s Rob Booth on how her leadership challenge eventually went pear-shaped is well worth a read.
Her withdrawal ended an unlikely tilt at Downing Street that chilled some parliamentary colleagues as it thrilled others.
Leadsom had risen to prominence alongside Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage as a figurehead of the victorious Leave campaign in last month’s EU referendum.
But last week her fellow minister Nick Boles had reflected alarm in parts of the parliamentary party at the speed of her rise when he told Tory MPs he was “seriously frightened about the risk of allowing Andrea Leadsom on to the membership ballot”. Her run delighted supporters such as Lord Tebbit, who voiced approval when the former City banker allowed herself to be cast as the next Margaret Thatcher, the first female prime minister, whose portrait adorns her office wall.
Jeremy Corbyn has been attending a parliamentary reception for the “Miami Five”, a group of Cuban men who were jailed in the US after being charged with espionage.
The Cuba Solidarity Campaign tweeted this picture of the Labour leader earlier:
Diane Abbott followed Eagle on Channel 4 news and immediately went on the attack over Eagle’s support for the Iraq war, as well as other controversial policies associated with the Blair era, including ID cards.
She also said that she was confident that Labour’s National Executive Committee would state that Jeremy Corbyn should be on the ballot in an upcoming leadership election. “It would make no sense [for him not to be]. It would be contrary to all the rules of natural justice, contrary to fairness, and I am sure the NEC will see that,” she said.
The NEC is due to meet at 2pm tomorrow to decide the terms of the contest, including whether the party’s current leader appears on the ballot paper automatically.
The shadow health secretary also insisted that Labour was prepared to fight a snap general election, although she sidestepped the question of whether she would vote to initiate such a poll in parliament. She’ll do whatever the shadow cabinet, as a whole, agrees.
She also insisted that the party is not split: “The people who actually fight an election at the grassroots are the people who go out and knock on doors, and they are not split.”
Angela Eagle has said that it’s “about time” that the Labour party had its first female leader as she suggested that Owen Smith should allow her to have a clear run in her bid to replace Jeremy Corbyn. Eagle was interviewed in the last few minutes on Channel 4 News, where she was asked about Smith’s widely reported interest in challenging for the leadership.
“The Conservatives have their second woman prime minister. The Labour party is the part of equality, who pioneered anti-discrimination legislation. It’s about time that they had their first women leader,” said Eagle, who added that she did not know what Smith was going to do.
She went on the offensive against Corbyn over his suggestion on the morning of the referendum result that article 50 – the formal mechanism for leaving the European Union – should be triggered swiftly. “I was shocked when Jeremy came out and said that we should trigger article 50 straight away,” said Eagle.
Asked whether she would try to reverse the result of the referendum, she replied: “I think we have to accept that the country has voted to leave, but that does not mean we should trigger it before we have done all the work [of negotiating].”
The UK should not be rushing towards the exit, said Eagle, who was also pressed on her support for the Iraq war. “I do regret the vote on the Iraq war, and if I had known then what we do now, I would not have voted for it,” she said.
Some have interpreted it as the outgoing prime minister keeping his spirits up. Of course, another is that it’s the sound of a man who is a little demob-happy.
Stay with it to the end, where the microphone picks him up as saying, “Right.” Presumably it was just before he got down to the serious business of packing.
As Angela Eagle mounts her bid to become leader of the Labour Party, reaction in her constituency ranges from total apathy to abject fury.
The Guardian’s Frances Perraudin has been visiting Wallasey, where Eagle doubled her majority in the last election, but where she is now facing a vote of no-confidence from local members.
“I don’t think she’s very highly thought of around here,” says Anthony Zausmer (pictured below), owner of the Coasters cafe in the seaside town of New Brighton. “I think people vote for her simply because they vote Labour and that’s it. If they put up a stuffed monkey, they’d vote for them.” He isn’t a fan of Jeremy Corbyn, but says he doesn’t think Eagle would make an effective leader of the Labour party.
Asked what the reaction was locally to the news that Eagle would stand against the Labour leader, Zausmer says: “I think there’s apathy, to be honest. I don’t think many people will care one way or the other, but I would imagine that my feeling about her not being an effective leader will be shared. She’s showed no leadership skills as a local MP.”
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