‘Keep calm and keep talking to Trump’

Lunch with Theresa May? The very idea provokes a look of dread in the eyes of some Westminster journalists, traumatised by memories of stilted culinary encounters with Britain’s former prime minister, the small talk exhausted before the starters arrive.

Cycling through sun-drenched Thames-side meadows to Bray, an implausibly quaint Berkshire village, my ears ring with warnings from former Downing Street allies of things I should not ask about: notably the time she held hands with Donald Trump at the White House. And Boris Johnson.

May does not like journalists much and she hardly ever talks about herself. She has not written a memoir and rarely discusses her tumultuous years as prime minister: Trump, Brexit, the disastrous 2017 election and her ultimate downfall, with Johnson waiting in the wings.

Yet, I’m intrigued. Friends insist that May is “not as buttoned-up as she used to be” and I have a secret weapon: geography. Specifically, we both studied geography at university — or “advanced colouring in”, as our friends like to call it — and long ago established what might heroically be called “a bond” as members of an oppressed minority.

We’re not that close. At a press conference at the height of the Brexit psychodrama, May repeatedly misidentified random balding, white, middle-aged journalists as “George Parker”. “I’ve got George Parker on my mind,” she told baffled reporters. I wasn’t there at all, sadly, but the Twitter memes live on.

So, May arrives on the dot of 12.30pm at Caldesi in Campagna, her favourite local Italian restaurant. She has just arrived off a flight back from Boston — she is teaching a course on “democracy in a changing world” at Yale — but she looks relaxed and in rude health: nothing like the anguished figure seen hopelessly attempting to navigate a path through the Brexit morass during her 2016-19 premiership.

It soon becomes clear that she has indeed loosened up. “The food here is very good, but just think of the money I’ve saved you,” she says, noting that the village of Bray is also host to two three-starred Michelin restaurants — the Fat Duck and the Waterside Inn. “The FT should be thanking me.”

“Normally we come here in the evening, it has a good atmosphere,” May says. Philip, her husband, enjoys the imaginative Italian food here too and has no truck with the Fat Duck down the road. “He doesn’t like it at all — he likes to know what he’s actually eating.” May, who discovered in 2013 that she has Type 1 diabetes, disappears to apply her insulin and then we get stuck in.

There are different people around Trump now. But the point is you’ve both got interests for your countries: you work to try to build a relationship

First things first. May goes for a glass of Gavi to accompany her main course of hake and I join her, as a crispy serving of Sardinian carasau bread with ricotta cheese and roast pepper arrives at the table. Before we move on to global geopolitics, May has something to get off her chest on the state of our favourite subject.

“One of the interesting things I discovered when I was over in the States is that there is no real geography — there are very few geography professors in the US,” she says. “It’s so annoying because it’s such a good subject. It gives you a great grounding in so many different aspects of the world and life.” She argues that if western leaders had better understood the tribal nature of Afghanistan, they would have been less inclined to run a failed attempt at central control from Kabul.

Our conversation is disrupted as May suddenly begins coughing, a sharp-edged piece of carasau lodging in her throat. I quickly scan the restaurant in case anything is starting to fall off the walls: it is eerily reminiscent of May’s 2017 famous Tory conference speech when she had a coughing fit, a protester handed her a P45 slip and then the set started to disintegrate.

“There’s a lesson there of not speaking while you’re eating,” May jokes, taking a gulp of water. While we’re on the subject of coughs, that conference speech must have been agonising? “That was one of those things where the first thing goes wrong, but then everything goes wrong,” she recalls. “Problems beget problems.” 

The following year May made amends by sashaying on to the conference platform to Abba’s “Dancing Queen”, to general astonishment. “I was backstage, I heard the music and I thought, why not?” she says. Wasn’t it staged? “It wasn’t prepared at all.” She says her chief of staff Gavin Barwell was open-mouthed. “He was thinking, what on earth is she doing?”

By now the starter has arrived. May has gone for oven-baked aubergine Parmigiana, while I opt for Scottish scallops in Jerusalem artichoke cream with pancetta. As we dig in, I want to hear about how she dealt with Donald Trump in his first term, given that the vicar’s daughter and the New York real estate hustler were hardly — shall we say — soulmates.

“The person you see in private is the same as the person you see in public,” she says. “I think this time he is more certain about what he wants to do, perhaps more certain about how to get there. There are different people around him now. But the point is that you’ve both got interests for your countries: you work to try to build a relationship that enables you to talk about those interests in a way that’s going to deliver for both sides.”

May notes that Trump approved the expulsion of more Russian officials from the US than any other country following Moscow’s 2018 poison attack in the English city of Salisbury, and the same year they worked together with the French to bomb chemical weapons factories in Syria. She was, she admits, unable to convince Trump on climate change.

But did they have a rapport? “I think, hopefully. yes. He did hold my hand!” I thought I’d have to work hard to get any information out of May on this celebrated White House encounter, but not a bit of it. “It was simply that as we were about to walk out in front of the world’s press, he said, ‘There’s a slope around the corner: be careful,’” she says. “I wasn’t too fussed about it. I wasn’t wearing particularly high heels. Then as we turned the corner, I suddenly realised he was holding my hand. It did take me by surprise, yes.” There was speculation that Trump was gripping on to May because of some kind of fear of slopes, though May generously says: “Maybe he was just trying to be a gentleman.”

The sad fact about immigration is the more you talk about it, the more people get concerned about it

Our starters are cleared and the conversation turns to May’s political project — begun while she was home secretary from 2010-16 — to tackle modern slavery, a passion that she now pursues on a global stage. This week, the Global Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking, which she chairs, produced a report intended to be a “wake-up call” to leaders who have become complacent on the issue.

May, who now sits in the House of Lords as Baroness May of Maidenhead, reckons that up to 50mn people around the world are trapped in slavery — and yet, she laments, “It has slipped down the agenda internationally. When I was PM, I did a call to action at the UN and a number of countries signed up. But my question is, what have they done?” She says companies need to look at their supply chains, and adds: “We’ve also got to look at the trafficking issue.”

As home secretary, May took a tough stance on illegal migration, but she believes that Kemi Badenoch, the current Conservative leader, is making a mistake by talking up the issue in an attempt to fend off the threat of Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK party. “The sad fact about immigration is the more you talk about it, the more people get concerned about it,” she says. “Just letting people get on with the job of trying to deal with it is probably the best route.”

May takes a broader view that by sounding populist notes on issues such as immigration, the Tories are driving moderate traditional supporters — including those living amid the manicured lawns and jetties of the tranquil Thames Valley — into the hands of the centrist Liberal Democrats. May’s old Maidenhead seat is now held by the Lib Dems.

She is clearly concerned about the direction her party is taking. “I’m not sure they are chasing Farage, but they don’t want him to appear to be ahead of them on certain subjects — immigration being one of them,” May says, staring at her Gavi. She is “disappointed” that Badenoch has said it will be “impossible” for Britain to meet its 2050 net zero target, a goal that May enshrined in law in the dying days of her premiership. May, who warned the Conservatives more than 20 years ago that they were perceived as “the nasty party”, says there is a risk that the Tories “put off a lot of people who would be your core supporters”.

May’s own experience of leading the Conservatives was punctuated by her disastrous decision to call a snap general election in 2017, with all the polls suggesting at the time that she would trounce her hard-left Labour opponent Jeremy Corbyn. Instead she lost her Commons majority. A presidential campaign was built around May’s supposedly “strong and stable” leadership, which turned out during the campaign to look weak and wobbly.

There wasn’t a sense of relief. I wanted to get through what I thought was a good deal. I was frustrated that I hadn’t managed it

May grimaces at the memory as her fillet of hake arrives, while I survey the extremely rich (but delicious) tagliolini with bianchetto truffle. Does she regret that the campaign was built so rigidly around her, with other cabinet members relegated to back-seat roles? “Yes,” is her simple answer. “I shouldn’t have allowed that to happen.” May appeared increasingly robotic as the Tory poll lead evaporated. “I should have gone for a campaign that was more for me — more out there on the doorstep.” On the night of the 2017 election, she seemed broken as many of her friends lost their seats. “It’s very difficult when you’re that person,” she says. “You take it personally.”

With a shrunken majority, May attempted to push through a “soft” Brexit deal to minimise the economic damage of Britain’s EU exit, but it proved impossible and Boris Johnson bided his time as it all fell apart. Trump, ahead of a state visit to Britain, endorsed the former foreign secretary as May’s successor. “He made points about what a good prime minister Boris would be,” May says ruefully. Was he right? “He’s entitled to his view,” is the icy reply.

The crucial moment for her premiership came at a meeting in 2018 at Chequers, the prime minister’s official country retreat, where May presented her Brexit plan to her cabinet. Ministers were helpfully given the number of a local minicab firm if they did not like it and wanted to quit. “Nobody walked out at that stage,” she recalls. “You assumed it was going to hold.”

But Brexit secretary David Davis quit soon afterwards and he was followed by Johnson. Does she think Johnson actually believed in Brexit? “I can’t answer that,” she says. “You’ll have to ask him.” In 2019 she was forced out of office and Johnson took over. “You suddenly discover there’s life outside that building,” May recalls of her exit from Number 10. “But there wasn’t a sense of relief. I wanted to get through what I thought was a good deal. I was frustrated that I hadn’t managed it.” Johnson then got “Brexit done” in its hardest possible form.

Co-owner Giancarlo Caldesi pops over to see how we have enjoyed the food. I foolishly opine that hake can sometimes be a little dry, but May attests that her fish is “moist” and our host explains at length how he achieves this benign culinary outcome. By now the former premier is ready for a dessert: a marsala and pistachio semifreddo. I unimaginatively go for the salted caramel ice cream. And the conversation is still flowing.

I ask May about her 2023 book The Abuse of Power, in which she lays out how the state has let down citizens, including victims of the Hillsborough football disaster. I ask her whether she herself was guilty of an abuse of power by failing to help the Windrush generation of Caribbean immigrants who faced deportation because they could not find documents to prove their right to stay.

May, who criticises politicians like Johnson for “going around blaming civil servants”, seems to deploy the same tactic when she says that Home Office officials were being “overzealous in their exercise of power”. Doesn’t she take some personal responsibility? “It was happening on my watch,” she says. “But we didn’t realise there was this group of people who were here legally but who wouldn’t have the ability to prove it.”

As we move on to coffees — two double espressos — May offers this advice to Keir Starmer when it comes to Trump’s tariffs: “Keep calm and keep talking. See if something can be negotiated.” She says a lot is at stake as mainstream politicians like Starmer attempt to fend off the populist threat: “I think it’s important that centrist governments show they can deliver,” she says. “Government is not easy. Government takes time.”

As the bill arrives, I ponder whether May shouldn’t write all this down for posterity? “I don’t really read political memoirs,” she says. “Lots of people say I should, for historical reasons as much as anything else. But I think too many of them are just ‘why I got everything right and everyone else didn’t’.” She has enough on her plate, taking on modern slavery, walking with Philip in the Swiss Alps, occasional speaking gigs, her 300 cookery books, her penchant for eye-catching shoes (in this case red Cecilia Quinn boots, if I can read my handwriting).

May admits she might have seemed buttoned-up over the years in her dealings with the media and concedes that essentially she is a politician from a different age: “Because of some of the things that had developed, I just had this concern that if you tried to be chummy, it would backfire on you somehow,” she says. “As people’s approach to politics developed, I think people wanted to see more of a person than they did before.”

I tell May that it has been a pleasure catching up and we finish with a few geographical pleasantries about mental maps, chalk streams and retreating glaciers. As she prepares to walk out into the spring Home Counties sunshine, I ask her how she views her premiership in the sweep of recent British history: “There’s a sense of transition,” she says. “A transition between politics as it was and politics as it is now.”

George Parker is the FT’s political editor

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