Date of birth: 1 October 1956 (aged 59)

Job: MP for Maidenhead since 1997. Home Secretary since May 2010

Education: Mainly state-educated at Wheatley Park Comprehensive School with a brief time at an independent school; St Hugh’s College, Oxford

Family: Married to Philip May Hobbies: Cooking – she says she owns 100 recipe books. Occasional mountain walks. On BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2014, she chose Abba’s Dancing Queen and Walk Like A Man, from the musical Jersey Boys, among her picks, alongside Mozart and Elgar.

Even before entering Downing Street, she made history by becoming the second longest serving home secretary in the past 100 years.

The daughter of a Church of England vicar, Hubert, who died from injuries sustained in a car crash when she was only 25, Theresa May’s middle class background has more in keeping with the last female occupant of Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher, than her immediate predecessor.

Born in Sussex but raised largely in Oxfordshire, Mrs May – both of whose grandmothers are reported to have been in domestic service – attended a state primary, an independent convent school and then a grammar school in the village of Wheatley, which became the Wheatley Park Comprehensive School during her time there.

The young Theresa Brasier, as she was then, threw herself into village life, taking part in a pantomime that was produced by her father and working in the bakery on Saturdays to earn pocket money.

Friends recall a tall, fashion-conscious young woman who from an early age spoke of her ambition to be the first woman prime minister.

Like Margaret Thatcher, she went to Oxford University to study and, like so many others of her generation, found that her personal and political lives soon became closely intertwined.

In 1976, in her third year, she met her husband Philip, who was president of the Oxford Union, a well-known breeding ground for future political leaders.

The story has it that they were introduced at a Conservative Association disco by the subsequent Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto. They married in 1980.

An early advocate of Conservative “modernisation” in the wilderness years that followed, Mrs May quickly joined the shadow cabinet in 1999 under William Hague as shadow education secretary and in 2002 she became the party’s first female chairman under Iain Duncan Smith.

She then held a range of senior posts under Michael Howard but was conspicuously not part of the “Notting Hill set” which grabbed control of the party after its third successive defeat in 2005 and laid David Cameron and George Osborne’s path to power.

This was perhaps reflected in the fact that she was initially given the rather underwhelming job of shadow leader of the House of Commons. But she gradually raised her standing and by 2009 had become shadow work and pensions secretary.

Nevertheless, her promotion to the job of home secretary when the Conservatives joined with the Lib Dems to form the first coalition government in 70 years was still something of a surprise – given that Chris Grayling had been shadowing the brief in opposition.

While the Home Office turned out to be the political graveyard of many a secretary of state in previous decades, Mrs May refused to let this happen – mastering her brief with what was said to be a microscopic attention to detail and no little willingness to enter into battles with fellow ministers when she thought it necessary.