SO IT was a coronation after all. On July 13th Theresa May, the home secretary, became Conservative Party leader and prime minister after her only remaining rival, Andrea Leadsom, the energy minister, pulled out of the race. Mrs Leadsom’s ostensible reason was that she had the backing of only 84 Tory MPs, against Mrs May’s 199. But what counted more was that, under pressure, she had shown her unfitness for the job in several gaffes, embroidering her financial career and hinting that, as a mother, she was better qualified than the childless Mrs May.
A new Tory prime minister is but one feature of the redrawn political landscape after Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. The opposition Labour Party has sunk into ever-deeper chaos under Jeremy Corbyn, who now faces a leadership challenge. The populist UK Independence Party has a vacuum at the top following the resignation of its leader, Nigel Farage, on the achievement of his career’s ambition. And although the Scottish Nationalists, the third-biggest party in Westminster, are united under Nicola Sturgeon, they are uncertain how and when to pursue independence post-Brexit.
Mrs May backed the Remain side in the referendum, unlike most Tory voters. Yet they welcomed her victory, if only because she has shown more political nous than her pro-Brexit opponents. Indeed, it is remarkable that the Brexiteers, having won a famous victory, have now largely fled the battlefield, leaving Remainers to sort out the mess. Mrs May was only ever lukewarm about the EU, and has promised that “Brexit means Brexit”. Still, she can expect cries of treachery if the process stalls.
As home secretary for six years, she built a reputation as a moderniser, picking fights with the police. She was quicker than most Tories to see which way the wind was blowing on issues such as gay marriage; in 2002 she warned that many voters saw the Conservatives as the “nasty party”. She is a child of England’s home counties, without the privileged background of the outgoing prime minister, David Cameron, and many of his circle.
Her first task was to form a cabinet. Philip Hammond, previously the foreign secretary, is to be the new chancellor. More surprisingly she gave Boris Johnson, a popular but undiplomatic Brexiteer, the Foreign Office and Liam Fox, a fellow Leaver who resigned from the cabinet in disgrace less than five years ago, the job of international trade secretary. David Davis, a veteran Eurosceptic, will take charge of the Brexit department. Amber Rudd, the energy secretary, will become home secretary. 
The next question will be whether she wants or needs a stronger democratic mandate. In 2007, when Gordon Brown assumed the premiership without any Labour challenger, she accused him of running scared by not holding an election to test his credentials. Yet she now insists that no election is needed before the current parliamentary term ends in 2020. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011 makes it harder than it used to be for prime ministers opportunistically to call early elections. But Labour’s disarray may yet tempt her to try, perhaps next year or in 2018.
Her biggest test of all will be Brexit. She has experience of Brussels, notably in skilfully negotiating Britain’s opt-out from most EU justice and home-affairs policies in 2014, while ensuring that it opted back in to 35 measures, including Europol (which assists member’ police forces), the European arrest warrant and the passenger-names directive. But she has not even met most of the EU leaders. No doubt they will give her a cautiously warm welcome (she has some affinities with Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, including an upbringing as a pastor’s daughter). But they will also say it is for her to explain how she wants to proceed—and how fast.
Mrs May insists that there will be no attempt to remain inside the EU and there can be no second referendum. But she has also said she will not trigger Article 50, the legal route to Brexit, until she has fixed her own negotiating position. And, although as home secretary she was fiercely anti-immigration, she has been careful to insist only that free movement of people in the EU cannot continue as it currently operates. She knows the value of full membership of Europe’s single market, and she understands the trade-off that may be necessary between preserving this and setting limits on free movement. It is within this framework that the hard bargaining with Britain’s partners will eventually take place. Many colleagues are floating ideas loosely called Norway-plus (or Norway-minus), which involve trying to keep as much as possible of Britain’s membership of the single market while being permitted to impose some controls or an emergency brake on free movement.
It will help that the recession that is now on the cards will have the side-effect of curbing immigration. But in other respects the economy will be the second big headache for Mrs May. She has sensibly junked her predecessor’s target of balancing the budget by 2020. In a speech on July 11th she talked of more investment in infrastructure (though she is opposed to a third runway at Heathrow airport) and of the need to improve Britain’s lamentable productivity. Less happily, she spoke of having a “proper industrial strategy” and evinced a surprising hostility to foreign takeovers of British companies; and she leaned leftwards in proposing that workers and consumers should sit on company boards, as well as limiting executive pay. Mrs May’s declared goals of building an economy that works for everyone, not just for the few, and of doing more to help the poor and disadvantaged who have suffered most in the past decade, are admirable. But she may yet need to curb her more interventionist instincts.
Her best asset, however, will be the chaos of the opposition. The Tories precipitated the Brexit vote for internal reasons and in doing so split their members and decapitated their leadership. It is extraordinary that they now appear the more united of the two main parties.