12 years is an aeon in politics..

With Party Conference season in full swing, and PM Theresa May due to give her headline speech in Manchester today, I’ve been digging through my archives.  It’s been over 12 years since I spent an hour with her out on the general election campaign trail in her Windsor constituency  (converted to mono for that retro news pic feel!). She was a lowly Shadow Secretary of State when I took these for The Times news pages, back when I did more newspaper work. Blair’s ‘New’ Labour was returned with a comfortable, albeit vastly reduced majority, for his 3rd term as PM. The result was never really in doubt, and I remember thinking at the time that May was of a generation of Tories that, by the time they next see power, would have shuffled off to the House of Lords and private sector consultancy work.. turns out what do I know?!