Theresa May to take over as Britain PM: Will she have the job from hell?

Of all the flamboyant characters — amidst the very public backstabbing — in the race to become Britain’s next prime minister, the winner turned out to be an understated workhorse who maintained a low profile throughout the campaign.

Interior Minister Theresa May, 59, is not well-known internationally, but she has served for six years in one of Britain’s toughest jobs, playing an important role in counter-terrorism policy, and will now take charge of delicate negotiations to separate Britain from the European Union (EU). Britain’s planned withdrawal has weakened the 28-nation bloc, created huge uncertainty over trade and investment, and shaken financial markets.

She was less visible — and less talked-about as a likely future prime minister — than Treasury Chief George Osborne and former London mayor Boris Johnson, but she proved to be the stealth candidate, out-maneouvering both in the intense competition to replace David Cameron at 10 Downing Street.

May on Wednesday will become the prime minister who leads Britain into talks to quit the European Union, after her last rival in the bid to succeed Cameron pulled out. May became the only contender after Andrea Leadsom — who had stirred a storm for suggesting she was more qualified to be premier because she had children — abruptly quit the race on Monday.

Accompanied by her banker husband Philip and surrounded by supportive MPs, a smiling May later stressed the need “to negotiate the best deal for Britain in leaving the EU” in brief comments outside parliament. With Cameron’s inglorious exit from the government after 52 percent Britons voted to leave EU, May has a score of challenges ahead of her as she moves into 10 Downing Street on Wednesday evening.

Apart from the long-term plans of the new British PM, May will have causes which would need immediate attention.

Brexit

Britain has faced the worst political turmoil in generations following 23 June’s shocking referendum vote to leave the EU. The outcome prompted Cameron to step down, plunging his ruling Conservative party into a bitter leadership race. One of the major tasks for May would be to steer Britain’s withdrawal from the EU.

During the EU referendum campaign, Osborne was passionate about remaining in the EU, and lost his leadership hopes when voters turned the other way. Johnson led the campaign to take Britain out of the EU, but never formally entered the leadership race because of dwindling support among his party’s lawmakers.

By contrast, May stayed largely out of the referendum fray. She tepidly backed staying in the EU in a single speech, then remained largely out of sight as the behemoths of the Conservative Party — including Cameron and Justice Secretary Michael Gove — did each other in.

Publicly, May has spoken thrice on Brexit and everytime she has maintained:

“Brexit means Brexit, and we’re going to make a success of it. There will be no attempt to remain inside the EU, no attempts to rejoin it by the back door, and no second referendum. The country voted to leave the EU, and as prime minister I will make sure that we leave the EU.”

May has ruled out any ‘second referendum’ and no re-entry in to the EU via the back door. But she, like the Leave campaign of which she was not a member, has clearly said with any precision what she thinks Brexit means. May’s ascension to the post of Britain’s premier means that the complex process of extricating Britain from the EU will be led by someone from the losing side of the acrimonious referendum campaign. She has said Britain needs time to work out its negotiating strategy and should not initiate formal divorce proceedings before the end of the year.

May’s biggest challenge will be to map out the course of Britain’s withdrawal, a process still clouded in uncertainty, and to sort out new terms of trade with the other 27 EU nations.  EU leaders will want immediate activation of Article 50, the trigger for formal negotiations. Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union allows a member state to notify the EU of its withdrawal and obliges the EU to try to negotiate a ‘withdrawal agreement’ with that state – it involves five points laid out below. May had initially said that the leadership would consiering activation of Article 50 only by January 2017. The road is tricky — if she does not immediately enforce Article 50, it will not go down well with EU leaders, if she softens her stand on it, her critics in UK won’t wait to pin this is as her first failure.

How May unites the 52-to-48 (percentage in which Britain voted during EU referendum) is possibly the largest challenge for the soon-to-be prime minister. Since May belonged to the Remain campaign, her detractors will be watching her closely for any hint of backsliding.

“We will have difficult negotiations with Britain, it will not be easy,” said German chancellor Angela Merkel who insisted that Britain would not be able to get free access to the EU’s single market without accepting free movement of people. European Economics Commissioner Pierre Moscovici said: “We should open the negotiations as quickly as possible in order to limit uncertainty.” More than 1,000 British lawyers said in a letter to Cameron that members of parliament should decide whether Britain leaves the EU because the referendum was not legally binding.

Opposition members of Parliament, responding to the impending appointment of May, demanded a general election. “It is crucial, given the instability caused by the Brexit vote, that the country has a democratically-elected prime minister,” Labour party election coordinator Jon Trickett said.

Britain’s dwindling economy

May wants to begin formal talks to leave the EU by the end of the year at the earliest, despite pressure from Brussels to speed things up. Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister who heads the Eurogroup of his 19 eurozone counterparts, reiterated calls for the transfer of power to take place as soon as possible, AFP reported.

“The sooner we can sort out — let me say it diplomatically — this problematic situation, the better,” Dijsselbloem told reporters. The pound, which hit a 31-year low following the Brexit vote, briefly rose after Leadsom, a pro-Brexit figure with no senior ministerial experience, withdrew from contention to be prime minister.

Described as a “safe pair of hands”, the new prime minister faces the daunting job of negotiating a deal with an angered EU, one that does not cripple the British economy. However, trade deal between the EU and Britain currently is a mess.

Cameron and EU leaders, till last week , were arguing over when to officially begin the process. Cameron had said he wanted to know what a deal will look like first, and the EU had said talks cannot begin until they are given confirmation that Britain wants out.

The UK will want access to Europe’s tariff-free single market, but to do so, Britain will also have to be forced to accept free movement of labour, a rule according to which EU citizens can turn up in Britain to look for work — with or without a job offer and vice-versa. This is where it gets tricky for Britain as stopping EU citizens from coming into the country in large numbers was a key argument in the campaign to leave the Union, in the first place.

British markets and the pound took a battering following the Brexit vote, but according to reports, they do appear to be bouncing back. Bigger worry for May would be the country’s debt, which is estimated at over  £1,000,000,000,000 — a trillion pounds ($1.3 trillion) or as CNN pointed out 90 percent of its GDP. Reuters reported that Britain lost its top credit ratings with agencies Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Group, following Brexit voting, which meant that investors are losing confidence in the nation’s leadership.

Immigrants and EU nationals

There are three million EU nationals currently living in Britain. May’s earliest challenges will be to decide what to do with that set of population. May had initially said that she couldn’t guarantee them a permanent place and, although she would like them to stay, their status would be subject to the withdrawal negotiations.

May has portrayed herself as a unifying leader and tough negotiator who can stand up to Brussels in the talks over Britain’s exit from the 28-nation bloc although the 59-year-old is notorious for her tough stance on immigration. Her work in Westminster has largely consisted of tightening immigration controls and refusing to welcome larger numbers of refugees into the island nation. She has fought, but failed, to cut immigration since 2010. According to Russia Today, May rejected EU’s proposal of compulsory refugee quotas. Her contention was that it is important to help people living in warzones and refugee camps, but “not the ones who are strong and rich enough to come to Europe”.

Even though her promotion to the top job was hailed by most world leaders as a progressive move, May will not guarantee EU nationals already living in a post-Brexit Britain can stay unless she receives a similar commitment from the other 27 member states about Britons overseas, Associated Press reported. Under her tenure, hundreds of asylum seekers, including women and children, have been kept in detention centers across Britain before being deported on secret charter flights, Guardian reported.

She was also responsible for the notorious billboard campaign telling immigrants to “Go home or face arrest”. The controversial scheme, where two advertising vans were driven around displaying the slogan and advertising a helpline to illegal immigrants who want to leave the UK, was deemed unsuccessful as just one illegal immigrant came forward.

Trident and defence spending Britain must prioritise replacing its Trident nuclear deterrent in the wake of the referendum to leave the EU with a parliamentary vote in July, May recently said. According to a Reuters report May wants all four of Britain’s submarines to be replaced and expects Cameron and Michael Fallon, the defence minister, to use a Nato summit in Poland to tell Britain’s allies that the British government is committed to Trident.

“The House of Commons should, before the summer recess, vote on Britain’s next-generation nuclear deterrent — and we should get on with getting it built.”

One of the first tasks of a British PM, after meeting with the Queen, is to write “the letter of the last resort.”

Given some time alone, the prime minister is requested to decide and write it in a letter addressed to the commanders of each of the Vanguard-class submarines in the navy. The message is then sealed in an envelope and sent to be placed into the boats’ safes. The options are said to include the orders “Put yourself under the command of the US, if it is still there”; “Go to Australia”; “Retaliate”; or “Use your own judgment”.

May has called for an “urgent vote” on whether to renew the nation’s Trident nuclear deterrent in the wake of the Brexit vote, “saying it would be “sheer madness” for Britain to give up on it. The British Parliament is expected to vote at the end of July on whether to proceed with building successor submarines to the existing Vanguard fleet, which is due to become obsolete within 15 years. According to BBC,  May wants all four submarines to be replaced, saying a post-Brexit Britain must show it is “committed” to working with its Nato allies.

Activists, however, claim the renewal of Trident is expensive, unsafe, ill-suited for contemporary warfare and in violation of international commitments. Those who oppose Trident renewal cited the massive cost of replacing the weaponry — £205 billion ($296 billion). The Labour party, however, is split over Trident. Many MPs back the nuclear deterrent but their leader, Jeremy Corbyn, does not.

With inputs from agencies