What is Theresa May’s greatest weakness as she goes into conference season? The Prime Minister had such a good start to the job that it’s easy to forget that she has the same problems that David Cameron did in terms of parliamentary arithmetic and fractures in her party over Europe. For Cameron, the parliamentary arithmetic was most difficult because there was a hardened core of eurosceptics who distrusted him, and because he and George Osborne had a habit of trying to sneak half-baked policies such as huge cuts to tax credits past MPs and hope that they wouldn’t notice (which they nearly didn’t).
But for May, there is already an embittered group of Tories who not only disliked the way they and their allies were treated in the reshuffle but also the way the new Tory leader has trampled all over Cameron’s legacy by making grammar schools her first big policy battle.
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