Do we like Theresa May?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Decent record and a real change of heart on LGBTQ+ rights, held back by early anti-gay votes and her defence of the hostile environment policy.
Theresa May is a vicar's daughter, born in Eastbourne on 1 October 1956. Her father died in 1981 and her mother months later. She studied geography at Oxford, worked at the Bank of England, and was a Merton councillor before becoming MP for Maidenhead in 1997. In 2002 she became the Conservative Party's first female chairman and told her own party it had a “nasty party” image.
She was Home Secretary from 2010 and by 2014 was the longest-serving in 50 years. She took over from David Cameron as PM in July 2016 after the EU referendum. In 2024 she was nominated for the Lords, so these days she's Baroness May of Maidenhead.
On LGBTQ+ rights her record is a real journey. Under Iain Duncan Smith she followed the party whip and voted against an equal age of consent and against same-sex adoption. Later she said she had “changed my view” and would vote differently today. As Home Secretary she worked with Lib Dem Lynne Featherstone on the 2013 same-sex marriage law, and Featherstone called her an “unsung hero” of it. Asylum groups did say conditions for LGBT asylum seekers got worse on her watch.
The big stain is the hostile environment. It was her Home Office policy of making life hard for people in the country illegally, and the Windrush scandal landed on it. In April 2018 she vowed to keep it, saying the Windrush generation “are British, they are part of us”, and that the government would put it right. Critics say the policy was the problem. Her defenders say the aim was to target people here illegally. Where you land depends on which of those you buy.
Since leaving Number 10 she's been a steadier presence. She chairs the Global Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking, and she sat down with Al Jazeera in April 2025 to talk about why modern slavery persists. In the Lords in February 2026 she warned that the proposed “British FBI” could be exposed to “undue political influence”. That's a long way from culture-war grifting.