History of the Conservative Party (UK) Foreign affairs select committee described the lack of planning as "gross negligence" which made his successor's task much more difficult. In July 2016 Theresa May succeeded David Cameron as Tory Leader and Prime Minister following Andrea Leadsom's withdrawal from the leadership contest. She is the second woman to lead the party and subsequently the second female Prime Minister, following Margaret Thatcher. With the support of 199/320 Conservative MPs, May was seen as the most experienced figure who could unite the party after a bitter campaign in which Michael Gove, a supporter and running mate of Boris Johnson, publicly declared Johnson
Racism in the UK Conservative Party fringes became a bastion of ugliness that the present-day party is still trying to distance itself from". He goes on to argue that this campaign had two legacies — initially, the degradation of race relations in the UK, which consequently "poisoned the debate over immigration" in the UK by "drag[ging] politics into the gutter". The racialised debate and discourse over immigration in British politics are said to have become popularised by Conservative MP Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech in April 1968, and the clamping down on postwar "new Commonwealth" non-white immigration while allowing concessions to the white-majority "old Commonwealth"