Cameron stepped down after Britons rejected his entreaties and voted to leave the EU in a referendum last month, severely undermining European efforts to forge greater unity and creating economic uncertainty across the 28-nation bloc.

May, 59 assumed office after an audience with Queen Elizabeth. An official photograph showed her curtseying and shaking hands with the smiling monarch, for whom she is the 13th prime minister in a line that started with Winston Churchill.

She is also Britain’s second female head of government after Margaret Thatcher.

She must try to limit the damage to British trade and investment as she renegotiates the country’s ties with its 27 EU partners. She will also attempt to unite a divided ruling Conservative party and a fractured nation in which many, on the evidence of the vote, feel angry with the political elite and left behind by the forces of globalization.

EU leaders, keen to move forward after the shock of ‘Brexit’, want May to launch formal divorce proceedings as soon as possible to help resolve the uncertainty.

But she has said the process should not be launched before the end of year, to give time for Britain to draw up its negotiating strategy.

Although she favored Britain remaining in Europe, May has repeatedly declared that “Brexit means Brexit” and that there can be no attempt to reverse the referendum outcome.

The shock vote partly reflected discontent with EU rules on freedom of movement that have contributed to record-high immigration – an issue on which May, as interior minister for the past six years, is politically vulnerable.

But EU leaders have made clear that free movement is a fundamental principle that goes hand-in-hand with access to the bloc’s tariff-free single market, a stance that will hugely complicate May’s task in hammering out new terms of trade.

“My advice to my successor, who is a brilliant negotiator, is that we should try to be as close to the European Union as we can be for the benefits of trade, cooperation and of security,” Cameron told parliament in his last appearance before resigning.

Appearing later in Downing Street with his wife Samantha and their three children, he delivered his parting remarks to the nation after six years dominated by the Europe question and the aftermath of the global financial crisis.

“It’s not been an easy journey and of course we’ve not got every decision right,” he said, “but I do believe that today our country is much stronger.”

In parliament, Cameron took the opportunity to trumpet his government’s achievements in generating one of the fastest growth rates among western economies, chopping the budget deficit, creating 2.5 million jobs and legalizing gay marriage.

Yet his legacy will be overshadowed by his failed referendum gamble, which he had hoped would keep Britain at the heart of a reformed EU.

May is seen by her supporters as a safe pair of hands to steer the country through the disruptive Brexit process. Colleagues describe her as cautious, unflappable and intensely private.

“I think around the cabinet table yesterday the feeling was that we have our Angela Merkel,” said Jeremy Hunt, health secretary in Cameron’s team which met for the last time on Tuesday.

“We have an incredibly tough, shrewd, determined and principled person to lead those negotiations for Britain,” Hunt told Sky News television.

German Chancellor Merkel will be May’s most important counterpart on the continent as the process unfolds. Both women are renowned for their firmness, pragmatism and discipline.

The new British leader is expected to immediately start putting together a new cabinet, a complex political balancing act in which she will try to satisfy opposing camps in her party.

She has said she plans to set up a new government department to lead the process of quitting the EU which would be headed by someone who had campaigned on the Leave side.

Financial markets, which had been extremely volatile since the referendum, reacted positively to news on Monday that May would become prime minister earlier than expected.

Stock markets traded within sight of their highest levels of the year as the prospect of stimulative economic policy across the developed world eased immediate concerns over the impact of the Brexit vote.

Economists predicted in a Reuters poll that the Bank of England would halve its main interest rate to 0.25 percent on Thursday in a pre-emptive strike to try to ward off a recession and reassure markets.

Follow Us

The post Theresa May becomes British PM, with task of leading Brexit appeared first on New Mail Nigeria.

Cameron made the announcement in a statement outside Downing Street after the final result was announced.

He said he would attempt to “steady the ship” over the coming weeks and months but that “fresh leadership” was needed.

The PM had urged the country to vote Remain, warning of economic and security consequences of an exit, but the UK voted to Leave by 52% to 48%.

England and Wales voted strongly for Brexit, while London, Scotland and Northern Ireland backed staying in.

UKIP leader Nigel Farage hailed it as the UK’s “independence day” but the Remain camp called it a “catastrophe”.

The pound fell to its lowest level against the dollar since 1985 as the markets reacted to the results.

Flanked by wife Samantha, Cameron said he had informed the Queen of his decision to remain in place for the short term and to then hand over to a new prime minister by the time of the Conservative conference in October.

It would be for the new prime minister to carry out negotiations with the EU and invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which would give the UK two years to negotiate its withdrawal, he said.

“The British people have voted to leave the European Union and their will must be respected,” said Mr Cameron. “The will of the British people is an instruction that must be delivered.”

The referendum turnout was 71.8% – with more than 30 million people voting – the highest turnout at a UK-wide vote since 1992.

Labour’s Shadow chancellor John McDonnell said the Bank of England may have to intervene to shore up the pound, which lost 3% within moments of the first result showing a strong result for Leave in Sunderland and fell as much as 6.5% against the euro.

UKIP leader Nigel Farage – who has campaigned for the past 20 years for Britain to leave the EU – told cheering supporters “this will be a victory for ordinary people, for decent people”.

Farage – who predicted a Remain win at the start of the night after polls suggested that would happen – said it would “go down in history as our independence day”.

He called on Prime Minister David Cameron, who called the referendum but campaigned passionately for a Remain vote, to quit “immediately”.

Labour sources also said David Cameron “should seriously consider his position”.

But pro-Leave Conservatives including Boris Johnson and Michael Gove have signed a letter to Mr Cameron urging him to stay on whatever the result.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who called for the UK to remain in the EU but was accused of a lukewarm campaign, said poorer communities were “fed up” with cuts and felt “marginalised by successive governments”.

“Clearly there are some very difficult days ahead,” he said, adding that “there will be job consequences as a result of this decision”.

He said the point he had made during the campaign was that “there were good things” about the EU but also “other things that had not been addressed properly”.

Former Labour Europe Minister Keith Vaz told the BBC the British people had voted with their “emotions” and rejected the advice of experts who had warned about the economic impact of leaving the EU.

He said the EU should call an emergency summit to deal with the aftermath of the vote, which he described as “catastrophic for our country, for the rest of Europe and for the rest of the world”.

Germany’s foreign minister Frank Walter Steinmeier described the referendum result as as “a sad day for Europe and Great Britain”.

But Leave supporting Tory MP Liam Fox said voters had shown great “courage” by deciding to “change the course of history” for the UK and, he hoped, the rest of Europe.

And he called for a “period of calm, a period of reflection, to let it all sink in and to work through what the actual technicalities are,” insisting that Mr Cameron must stay on as PM.

Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has said that the EU vote “makes clear that the people of Scotland see their future as part of the European Union” after all 32 local authority areas returned majorities for Remain.

Follow Us

The post David Cameron steps down after UK votes to leave EU appeared first on New Mail Nigeria.