Theresa May’s treatment of Labour will tell us all we need to know about her leadership style

I hope, in the most caring way, that Theresa May feels sick today. If she isn’t bent over the bowl, a hint that she is at least on high dose anti-emetics would be reassuring. If the new Prime Minister swans into Number 10 with her stomach unperturbed by rank terror, something is dangerously wrong. Never in peacetime politics has so much rested on one person, and gastric immunity to the stress would be a sign of incipient madness.

We will probably never know how May is actually feeling, since she is hardly the type to confide an emotional state, even to her memoirs. But you can guess at numb disbelief, raw exhilaration and trademark glacial resolve about the gruesome challenges ahead.

Perhaps she pictures herself as Geoffrey Boycott, such an unlikely childhood hero for a middle class Sussex gal, walking to the crease with England following on in Jamaica against the most fearsome fast bowling attack ever assembled. Then again, recalling how one helped Geoffrey Howe assassinate Margaret Thatcher, she might want to avoid cricketing analogies in the Tory-EU context.

Far from being a reincarnation of Thatcher, as her recent declaration of faith in society subtly underlined, in one way she is the precise opposite. Where Thatcher was a northerner who moulded herself into the archetypal Home Counties southerner, May took the reverse route. Although she was born in Eastbourne, the love of Boycott and plain spoken dourness cast her as a stereotypical Yorkshirewoman. Nora Batty’s smart-as-a-whippet niece, perhaps, who is still a lovely lass despite the airs and graces and all the nonsense with those high class escort girl shoes.

Despite being an arch Tory modernizer, she is no part of a Cameron continuum, radiating genteel distaste for the born-to-rule entitlement of the Notting Hill-Cotswolds elite whose day is done.

She isn’t a grandstanding narcissist like Boris, an exhibitionist maverick intellectual à la Michael Gove, a graduate in Dullard Sycophant Studies from Michael Fallon University, or a throwback to the post-war consensus exemplified by Macmillan and Heath. Nor, despite her duffing up the odious Police Federation, is she a recidivist firestarter in the Ken Clarke mould.

What she is remains far harder to define than who she is not. If she resembles any public figure, her gift for protecting her inscrutability suggests the woman who will shortly hand May control of the country over a cuppa and a diabetes-friendly biscuit at the Palace. And if May is unmistakably anything, it is the classic school swot – the industrious only child of attentive parents who serenely progressed from grammar school to and beyond Oxford with nothing less than a high B on her exam scorecard.

Now that the examination becomes unimaginably harder even than the Home Office, her vaunted experience is anything but an automatic advantage. The most experienced US politician to become president was Richard Nixon. Anthony Eden, James Callaghan and Gordon Brown were vastly battle-hardened. But they were even more battle wearied, and shackled to massive experience – respectively of empire, trade union sovereignty, and juggernaut machine politics – they could not escape. Unable to grow in power, they shrank into hapless fall guys.

Whether May can inflate herself from fiercely competent departmental head into a figure of unification, no incoming PM has been handed a dilemma like hers. I refer not to how to extricate us from Europe and how to construct her Cabinet without scattering acorns of discontent which might grow into oaks of Tory civil war. There is more than enough of the governess about her, one suspects, to deal with the naughty boys on the Tory benches who respond pliantly to the thwack of a hairbrush.

It is what she does or does not do to Labour that will offer the best early guide to her potential. Were Cameron in her kitten heels with George Osborne advising him, you know what he would do. He’d kill Labour to death.

A snap autumn election, whether that slapstick brigade of circus lemmings was “led” by Jeremy Corbyn or Angela Eagle, wouldn’t just mean a crushing Tory majority. A Lenor-fresh PM with more public goodwill than any newbie since Tony Blair would destroy Labour beyond hope of repair.

May began encroaching on traditional Labour turf in Monday’s speech. Imagine the result if she spent the next months banging on about employees in boardrooms, curtailing CEO salaries and helping the working poor. Imagine how that would play while 90 per cent of Labour MPs were running on a diametrically different platform to Corbyn. Or if, under Eagle, canvassers peddled a Corbynite panacea in defiance of the official Tiny Tears manifesto. How certifiably tribal would you have to be not to prefer Theresa May? Would Labour get much more than 20 per cent in the popular vote and retain 100 MPs in circumstances in which the Tories could win a landslide with Rose West at the helm?

May will come under tremendous pressure to renege on her pledge to avoid a snap election, as she very easily could. She won’t need reminding that Gordon Brown’s refusal to seek a mandate was a suicidal error. Or that there could be no better time to win the large majority she needs in order to avoid being held hostage by Iain Duncan Smith, Bernard Jenkin and the other grievance junkies on the Tory nutter right who will seek their next betrayal highs from perceived Brexit negotiation treachery and the wicked maltreatment of Andrea Leadsom.

This is the mother of temptations for any PM. Only a potentially great one would resist it on the grounds that a one-party state – a state literally with only one relevant party, and no trace of a functional opposition on the horizon – is an abomination to a true democrat of any political persuasion.

If she is as rigidly committed to rejecting opportunistic short term advantage in favour of serving the UK’s long term interests as she would have us believe, she will ignore the mounting clamour to put Labour out if its misery, and give it time to recover if it possibly can.

Theresa May is the one in the purple, looking down on Labour with a flattened palm from the imperial box, and the crowd will soon be screaming at her to lower her thumb. At some point between any initial nausea fading and the first visible outline of a Brexit deal, even before she knights Geoffrey Boycott, a willfully opaque new Prime Minister will define herself with a choice between savagery and clemency. It could be the most important decision she ever takes.