The man who is really running Britain

BIRMINGHAM — The most influential adviser in British Prime Minister Theresa May’s government grew up in a modest brick house in a working-class neighborhood in Birmingham, ten miles and a world away from the sprawling conference center where the Conservative Party will hold its annual conference this week.

Nick Timothy, the football-mad son of a factory supervisor, spent his childhood in Tile Cross. Forty minutes by bus from the city center and not far from the airport, the neighborhood has been hard hit by deindustrialization. It suffers from higher-than-average rates of crime, welfare dependency, social housing and joblessness. In June’s vote on Britain’s membership of the European Union, some 75 percent of the area’s residents voted to leave.