Theresa May’s appointment as Conservative leader and Prime Minister invites comparisons with Margaret Thatcher. But there is another politician with whom better parallels can be drawn

Britain’s new Prime Minister is, according to Kenneth Clarke MP, “a bloody difficult woman”. Still, he said to Sir Malcolm Rifkind, “you and I worked for Margaret Thatcher”. The comparison is, it seems, irresistible. Prime Minister May was always destined to be compared to the Iron Lady, on account of her gender, her Conservatism, her appetite for hard work, her formidable determination, her bloody-mindedness, and, indeed, her Christianity.

Margaret Thatcher was a confident and sincere Christian. She was a preacher before a parliamentarian, a Christian before a Conservative, and always convinced that political problems had spiritual roots. “Economic problems never start with economics. They have much deeper roots in human nature,” she said in her first conference address as Conservative Party leader in 1975.

Margaret Thatcher’s father was a Methodist lay preacher; Theresa May’s was an Anglican priest. Hubert Brasier trained at the College of the Resurrection at Mirfield and was Chaplain of All Saints’ Hospital, Eastbourne, when May was born, before moving to be Vicar of Enstone with Heythrop, and then to St Mary the Virgin in Wheatley, Oxfordshire. According to Mrs May, he never “imposed” his Christianity on his daughter when she was growing up (he died in a road accident when she was 25), but she inherited it nonetheless, telling BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2014 that the Christian faith is “part of who I am and therefore how I approach things … [it] helps to frame my thinking and my approach”. As if to emphasise the point, her choice of music included two hymns, “When I Survey The Wondrous Cross” and the more unusual choice for an Anglican, Thomas Aquinas’ “Pange Lingua”, beloved of Catholics who sing its Tantum Ergo at Benediction.