PROFILE - Theresa May: The premier who exited over Brexit

By Ahmet Gurhan Kartal

LONDON (AA) - The U.K.'s outgoing premier Theresa May was born on Oct. 1, 1956 in Eastbourne, Sussex, England as Theresa Mary Brasier.

The only child of an Anglican minister, she ascended to the top government office in 2016 after becoming the leader of the Conservative Party following the sudden resignation of former Prime Minister David Cameron after the Brexit referendum.

She attended the University of Oxford and met her future husband Philip May in a social occasion via Pakistan’s future prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

The couple got married in 1980.

Theresa May worked for the Bank of England for a period before her political career took off as a councilor in 1986.

She was elected as a Tory member of the House of Commons for Maidenhead in 1997 after failing in two previous elections.

May held several ministerial posts in various shadow cabinets between 1999 and 2009.

She went down in history as the country's longest-serving home secretary after having served in the position from 2010 to 2016.

May, together with then-prime minister David Cameron, campaigned to remain in the EU prior to the EU referendum held in June 2016.

She became the party leader after Cameron’s departure and the second female prime minister of the country on July 13, 2016.

The biggest challenge for May during her term in office has been negotiating Brexit with both the EU and her own country's parliament deputies.

Despite many attempts, she failed to get approval from the House of Commons on the EU Withdrawal Agreement reached with the bloc.

May decided to go for a snap general election in 2017 for a greater majority in parliament, despite having said she would not hold a general election.

The Conservative Party lost the majority as the result and had to form a minority government with the support of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) -- a move described by some as breach of 1998 Belfast Agreement.

The Conservative Party votes have been reduced during May’s premiership as Tory voters believed the party failed greatly in delivering the EU referendum result of leaving the bloc.

She also received one of the most humiliating defeats ever suffered by a serving U.K. government on her first attempt to pass the Brexit deal through parliament as the large majority of MPs rejected the deal.

Four major terror attacks hit London and Manchester during her term in office.

She has been heavily criticized for austerity measures, cuts to social benefits, a decline in police numbers and a slow response to the 2017 Grenfell fire disaster.