The elder of the women making the introduction was Benazir Bhutto. Her friend was Theresa Brazier, at that time an undergraduate studying geography at St Hugh’s College. It was Benazir Bhutto who introduced Theresa May to her future husband.
Benazir and Theresa remained friends right up to Benazir’s death in December 2007. Mrs May paid tribute to Benazir Bhutto at a speech at the United Nations in September 2017 and the door of No 10 Downing Street was often open to Pakistan’s prime ministers. Yet the political world that they had ambitions for when they were both students could not have been more difficult to enter. It was almost entirely male and highly discriminatory against women.
As a result, in the tributes that have been paid to the prime ministership of Theresa May, much has been made of her apparent failures and the fact that at the end of a very good speech outside No 10 – in some ways about what she wanted to achieve and could not because of the intense siege she was under - in her final sentence about the “honour” of serving her country and her “love” for that country, her voice broke and the tears came. Her critics, and indeed the UK media, made much of this. Her sorrowful visage was on the front page of every newspaper. Horrible misogyny, since they would not have run such an image if it had been a male prime minister.
This contempt, of course, was because they feared her. It was known that she had a habit of running rings around David Cameron and his Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, because she was always on top of her facts and her briefs. The more ordinary reality was that unlike many of her political colleagues, she was just very conscientious and a very hard worker.
Given the impossible political situation that she inherited – a country divided by a referendum called by her predecessor David Cameron to leave the European Union – she worked subtle miracles which still remain invisible to her political colleagues.
Primarily, as the deadline of March 29, 2019 approached, when the UK was supposed to leave the EU, we found ourselves on March 30 still in the EU. Even more miraculous on May 23, we voted in the EU elections.
Politics, whether domestic or international, is about keeping all options open when those who use their power to bully and threaten are intent on shutting the options down. For three long years Theresa May had to do her best in the interests of her country to keep those options open. She had to do this while the contemptuous right-wing males of her party worked endlessly to undermine her.
Mostly it was achieved, in Shakesperean terms by being “Mistress Answer Answerless.” She was brilliant at phrases such as “brexit means brexit” and “Britain will be leaving the EU” (possibly in 100 years’ time) which were both truisms and entirely empty. In Brussels, the ebullient EU co-ordinator Guy Verhofstadt complained in exasperation in February this year after another visit by Theresa May with her “deal”: “She uses us …nothing happens.” He was too blind to see that “nothing happens” was the strategy and the point.
Above all, Theresa May’s guiding star was the country she served, not political ambition. Like Benazir Bhutto she made mistakes. The day-to-day strain of the politics around her and the powerful individuals who wanted her gone finally caught up with her.
But she gave in only when the strategic goals had been achieved. The UK did not leave the EU on March 29 and we have just had EU elections. The options for the UK remain open. Given every attempt to dethrone her over three years, that was a massive achievement.