Philip May: five facts about the prime minister’s husband

Theresa May’s husband, Philip, has retained a relatively low profile for much of his life and remains a little-known figure outside of Westminster.

But he is now under the spotlight after becoming embroiled in a Downing Street civil war over the future direction of Brexit.

Tim Shipman at The Sunday Times reports that he “helped to persuade his wife to seek a deal with Brussels that could win over Tory Eurosceptics and their allies in the Democratic Unionist Party”, thwarting a plan to get a cross-party deal for a customs union with the EU.

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Stressing the dangers of seeking a cross-party compromise that some in the party believe would irrevocably fracture the Conservatives, his intervention drew the ire of the prime minister’s chief of staff, Gavin Barwell, who apparently accused him of “scuppering” attempts to reach out to Labour MPs.

Although Downing Street has dismissed the claims as “utter bunkum”, they do “raise intriguing questions about who really wears the trousers in Downing Street”, says The Daily Telegraph.

“The prime minister’s husband shuns the limelight,” says Shipman, “but was twice instrumental in convincing his wife not to resign - after the 2017 general election and again after the party conference that year.”

Here are five other things you might not know about the man married to the most powerful woman in Britain:

He had a successful City career

While his wife was climbing the political ladder, May was forging a solid career in finance, working as a fund manager for Prudential Portfolio Managers, De Zoete & Bevan and Deutsche Asset Management. He has worked as a relationship manager for Capital Group for the last decade. “Around the office, he is a fairly head-down type of guy,” one of his colleagues told The Guardian. “There is a stereotypical investment manager with a big ego – he’s not like that at all.”

He’s a people person

May has been described by friends of the couple as “the more gregarious of the two”, the BBC reports. A long-time pal told the Financial Times: “He was better with clients than he was [with] money. He is brilliant with people.” A former client, who had many dealings with May in the City, described him as an extremely bright and polite man. “[He was] a real gentleman who did not push sales like other salesmen.”

But he doesn’t like the limelight

A Conservative source said May was always “three or four paces behind his wife” at party conferences and “very happy” to avoid the media spotlight. Few who know him expected him to take on a very public role once his wife became leader of the country, yet amid reports he was instrumental in convincing her to abandon cross-party Brexit talks and persuaded her not to resign on two separate occasions, “just how much power does Philip May actually wield?” asks the Telegraph.

He’s no Denis Thatcher

Many have drawn parallels between May and Dennis Thatcher, prime minster Margaret’s husband, but the pair come from very different backgrounds and have very different ambitions. Unlike Thatcher, May, the son of teacher and a shoe wholesaler, was not privately educated. Born in Norfolk, May spent much of his childhood in Merseyside before leaving for Oxford University to study history. It was there he met his future wife, after being introduced by Benazir Bhutto, the future prime minister of Pakistan. Also unlike Thatcher, May had his own political ambitions and was president of the Oxford Union.

He’s the PM’s rock

Although she typically shies away from discussing her personal life, the PM was unusually candid about her relationship with her husband when she appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. Speaking about the death of her parents, she said she had “huge support in my husband and that was very important for me”. She added: “He was a real rock for me - he has been all the time we’ve been married, but particularly then, of course, being faced with the loss of both parents within a relatively short space of time.” Despite celebrating their 38th wedding anniversary last year, “they still totally love each other and have a great friendship”, a friend of the couple told The Guardian.