As Theresa May stepped through the black door of 10 Downing Street on Wednesday evening as Britain’s prime minister, she did exactly what she had promised when launching her leadership bid two weeks earlier: “I just get on with the job in front of me.”
The quiet woman of British politics has played the long game and triumphed. The UK has its second female prime minister, and the first with the task of taking the country out of a major supranational organisation.
On entering office Mrs May, who is 59, immediately set about a radical overhaul of Whitehall’s structure, ruthlessly disposing of several former colleagues and startling observers around the world by making her erstwhile leadership rival Boris Johnson foreign secretary.