May’s man of influence

Civil servants in the Home Office, even the senior ones, always felt a little nervous when walking towards Theresa May’s office. It wasn’t so much the meeting with the Home Secretary that they dreaded as the characters who lurked in the room directly outside hers. One senior official describes a typical scene: Fiona Hill, one of May’s special advisers, ‘sitting back, getting ready to go out with her stockinged feet on the desk, giving a civil servant an absolute rollicking’. May’s two other special advisers, Nick Timothy and Stephen Parkinson, were also forces to be reckoned with. Now, it seems, this team is being reassembled — to help her run Britain.

All three have taken a break from government in the past couple of years. Hill was forced to resign after a scandal in which a confidential cabinet memo concerning Michael Gove was leaked. Parkinson, well regarded throughout Whitehall, became a key figure in Vote Leave; that he left such a good job to join the campaign was taken as a sign of his personal commitment to Brexit.