The motivations of Theresa May can be distilled down to her relationship to the Conservative Party, which has been with her from a young age. In this way, her role as leader of the country is really about her masking her inner inclinations towards the protecting the interest of her party. She is a product of her conservative background, and a dutiful servant of the Conservative Party.
These deep-set motivations explain her reasons for embracing the meaning of Brexit after the EU referendum. This allowed her to discard the "mask" she wore as part of Cameron's more centrist liberalism, and also explained her evident glee in sending George Osborne into parliamentary exile. She was able to express her reactionary, parochial instincts more freely under the cover of respecting the Brexit vote.
More tellingly, once she became Prime Minister, the more neurotic "quirks" of her personality became public knowledge.
As Home Secretary, she was known to protect her privacy fiercely, but as someone to work with, she was known to be secretive and rely on only a few loyalists (Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill in particular). One of the traits she had that became so useful to David Cameron was her reliability to master a "brief" i.e. to loyally repeat the "agreed" line. This was one of main things that accounted for her longevity at the Home Office.
Indeed, it could even be argued that the Home Office is continuing her work even after she has left it, leaving the official Home Secretary's role to often act as little more than a spokesperson for May's own strategy. In other words, Theresa May still seems in effective charge of Home Office strategy, leaving the Home Secretary to have little control over what the department's officials decide; the officials seem to be simply following the same strategy that May had when she was at the Home Office, regardless of what her successors might think. With Theresa May, Home Office strategy seems to be run almost directly by the Prime Minister.
To be fair, this isn't a new phenomenon, though: when Gordon Brown took over as Prime Minister after being head of the Treasury for so long, it was well-known that his successor at 11 Downing Street had similar issues as Chancellor. But the fact the Home Office's persistence with policies that have even been criticized by the Home Secretary himself, suggests that May's psychological impact has been to turn the Home Office's staff into her personal "minions" (or "flying monkeys", if you prefer). The Home Secretary doesn't even control what goes on in his own ministry.
Interactions with the social environment
As Prime Minister, her ability to "master" a brief has since become a point of satire: turning her into the "Maybot", incapable of answering a question in any other way than the one she has learned, and equally unable to coherently answer a question that she hasn't been given advance warning about. When these things do happen, the result is as cringe-worthy as it is ridiculous.
At the other extreme, this has frequently led her to answer questions in a way that resembles crazy-making semantic nonsense. While politicians are famous for "dissemination", May's method to "not answer a question" is almost unparalleled, forming sentences and entire speeches often entirely absent of meaning. Speeches that she has given at times resemble "Vogon poetry" recitals, making them almost physically-painful to endure. You wonder if this is actually intentional; by discouraging media appearances by making them so awful to listen to, she succeeds in reducing the need to speak in public to a bare minimum.
In this way, her naturally-insular instincts allow her to rule from the bunker, unseen like an enigmatic arm-chair general. This has provided yet more satirical material, of course, but in the real world where real answers to problems are needed, her semantic nonsense has driven those that need to make actual strategic decisions to the point of madness.
That being said, while her instincts have seemed to be to reduce her public speaking engagements as much as possible, in recent months, the ever-more-chaotic turn of events (caused from her own strategic inaction) have forced her to make ever more frequent appearances in parliament: to "answer" questions to the house.
But again, she seems to have lately developed an almost masochistic pleasure in this experience: mechanically responding to questions with crazy-making semantic nonsense. Literally hours and hours of parliament's time has been eaten up in this way, as she eats up time by wasting parliamentarians'. It's hard not to get the impression that the more time she spends formulating different ways of saying nothing, she is privately enjoying the practice it allows her to hone her semantic-nonsense-making skills. To borrow the "Maybot" analogy, it's as though each three-hour-long session of speaking to parliament without saying anything allows her semantic-nonsense-making software to be upgraded yet further. Parliament can never win, because her "semantic software" is always one step ahead of them. The fact that such parliamentary sessions thus resemble a form of psychological torture is something that May seems to have little concern about.
This "semantic software" has also been shown off to Brussels, as well, as has been reported, in cabinet itself.
Apart from May's idiosyncratic "speaking skills", there are also more overtly-displayed traits of social dysfunction.
Her lack of even basic social skills is now well-documented. She famously doesn't "do" small talk. It's as though she simply has no idea what to say to people beyond some basic phrases she may have learned through experience. This indicates a kind of personality that struggles to understand some of the basics of human interaction.
More generally too, this feeds through to her inability to make people feel comfortable in her company; in fact, it appears she has no instinct to want to make people feel comfortable. There are anecdotes of her having meetings with colleagues where almost nothing is said on her part - either in words or in meaning. It is this that also makes spending time with her socially feel like a form of torture. Her stilted mannerisms and frosty demeanor give the impression of someone who simply doesn't like social situations or human interaction at all. This seems more than just "introversion"; it seems like something bordering on pathological. It's as though, at a fundamental level, she doesn't understand people.
Cognitive understanding
When it comes to decision-making and issues of cognition, there are also indications that Theresa May's judgement and sense of perspective is lacking at some critical level.
As said before, there have been plenty of occasions where it appears she has an inability to relate to others; both in terms of social interaction, but also in terms of cognitive understanding. In other words, it's as though she lacks the ability to relate to another's perspective. Either she seems unable to see when others are bored to death by her inability to answer a question, or she can see it but doesn't care. Either one of these would indicate some kind of deeper issue of lacking empathy. More seriously, when real-life situations (such as the Grenfell Tower fire) intrude, her inability to relate to others' feelings has been painfully-clear to see.
One can speculate where this comes from; whether it is just the way she is as a person, or was something that happened as a result of personal experience (and her life has been touched by family tragedy). Regardless, it poses serious questions about how she makes decisions that affect the whole country. And the way she has handled Brexit is a clear example of that: she has been determined to stick to her own interpretation of the vote regardless of what effect it has on others.
Theresa May's (robotic) ability to learn a "brief" as Home Secretary leads on to her bloody-minded obsession with immigration; both in sticking to the target of reducing immigration numbers even after it was clearly impractical, and also in counting international students as "immigrants". Her obsession with immigration demonstrates her blinkered (and neurotic) tendencies, which are a further sign of a perspective on others that appears "anti-social" in its origin. Her inability to see things from another's point of view - a key attribute of empathy - seems missing when it comes to immigration. This is true of her stance on social issues in general, but her rigidity on immigration is the most glaring example.
It is her self-evident obsession with immigration that led to her "red lines" in the Brexit negotiations with the EU. It was "immigration" that led to her interpreting Brexit as the necessity to leave the single market and customs union, which is what led to the infamous "back-stop" (a British idea, it should be remembered). Thus many of the chaotic shenanigans over the British negotiating position have been due to May's own inability to see Brexit as anything other than a vote against immigration.
As has been seen, as reality has shown many of May's political "stratagems" to be ever more absurd, her inability to change political tack and semantic rigidity have made her look like an increasingly-surrealist figure. But on the point of being able to think how others' would see her, she is either cognitively-incapable of this, or absent of any shame.
Either one of these explanations would point to an "anti-social" aspect to her personality. The truth may be a little of both, as we have already seen that she seems to lack empathy; while her apparent shamelessness at simply disseminating, or repeating the same plan as before even after its flaws have been exposed, indicates a bloody-mindedness that is pathological. She will continue with the same approach until it succeeds, regardless of the wider effect.
In this sense, she doesn't care what others think. This attribute was inferred even when she was campaigning for the leadership: that she wasn't interested in (and actually reviled) the superficial "popularity contest" aspect of modern politics. This was demonstrated by her decision to interpret the Brexit result as being an anti-immigration vote, regardless of any wider contributing issues. Her tendency to operate in a "bunker mentality" also supports the view that she would make decisions regardless of outside voices' advice.
While this approach can have its advantages at times, the fact that it is May's "default setting" tells us that she is someone who wants to close-off the outside world, making decisions that affect millions behind closed doors, deep in her "bunker" with a small circle of trusted advisers. This is the mentality of the "anti-social" autocrat; of a ruler safely separated from the ruled.
So Britain has come to be led by someone whose tendencies are anti-social in their nature; who seems to have a problem understanding people, and whose approach to politics seems to lack empathy.
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