The bestselling author Hilary Mantel has said that Theresa May has “handled the question of her femininity well” in Downing Street.
Mantel, known for her historical novel Wolf Hall, said that Mrs May “doesn’t strike you as a man in drag, which a lot of female politicians do”.
On the question of the prime minister’s values, however, she was scathing. “I think it’s very hard to find if she [Mrs May] has any principles at all. She seems entirely subsumed by personal ambition,” Mantel told the Radio Times. She added that the prime minister was being “extremely disingenuous” in her reaction to Jeremy Corbyn’s criticism of British foreign policy days after the Manchester terror attack.
“It’s the implication that Corbyn is blaming Britain for the actions of terrorists, whereas in fact he’s saying our foreign policy doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” she said. “We do thankfully have some impact on the world . . . This is very different from saying we are to blame.”
Mantel said that the Labour leader had “got the response to the bombing right”, but that he reminded her of “the people I used to know in student politics”.