Alongside the question “what will Brexit mean?”, the most salient public policy question for British business remains as broad as it is deep: what will Theresa May’s government do? This is a question most effectively considered in several parts.

The first is whether the new Prime Minister will feel the need to call an early election. If the benefits outweigh the risks the answer might be in the affirmative, but that might not necessarily be the case. The primary benefit would be to give the opportunity for the new Prime Minister firstly to put a new manifesto to the country and secondly, given current opinion polls, to enlarge her Commons majority. But the first may not be necessary if her government feels able to attain its objectives without doing so, and the second might actually create more problems than it solves.

An election, like a referendum, throws the control of politics out of parliament and into the hands of a potentially fickle electorate. If the referendum and the 2015 election result have taught politicians anything, it is the risks of assuming the outcome of an election.

And it’s not just the electorate that the Prime Minister has to worry about.  A lesson from the bitter experience of John Major during the 1997 election when candidates made pledges on the euro that contradicted the national Conservative manifesto, despite the pleas of their leader, is the  risk of a Conservative Prime Minister  losing control of candidates’ local manifestos on the issue of the EU and ending up with an ill-disciplined campaign.

In this febrile time the substantive risk for Theresa May of an early election is that while she would be likely to secure a larger majority, it might actually diminish her command of parliament especially on the issue of what “Brexit” actually means. Were an election to be called, Conservative candidates will face undoubted local pressure to pledge themselves to “red lines” on Brexit which would hamper the Prime Minister’s room for manoeuvre.

May’s team will have a sense of the likely candidates who would become Conservative MPs should she win a larger majority through an early election and she is likely to make a judgement of the risks of calling an election on their considered advice.

Were she not to call an election, in a more normal political climate the risk of the smaller majority she has inherited from David Cameron would be a rebellion of a dozen or so of her MPs combining with the Opposition to make life difficult for her government. The reluctance that rational Labour MPs will have to face an early election given Labour’s parlous polling position makes that scenario less likely.

The other question in the mix is the extent to which the ability of May’s government to set out a more radical agenda might be thwarted by the constraints afforded by the Conservative Party 2015 manifesto.

There is no constitutional rule that requires it to be. Historical precedent – the most important factor in shaping the interpretation of Britain’s unwritten constitution – can be mined for sufficient examples of a new Prime Minister setting their own agenda mid-way through a political term. Harold Macmillan (1957-59), James Callaghan (1976-9), John Major (in 1990-92) and Gordon Brown (2007-2010) all took over part-way through a parliamentary term and set out a profile and agenda distinct from their manifesto inheritance. Radical new initiatives were embraced, some (such as Callaghan’s education standards agenda) proving more durable than others (such as John Major’s cones hotline). David Cameron’s government breached manifesto pledges where it suited them (e.g. on cancelling the £1bn investment in Carbon Capture and Storage for gas power stations). It is also understood that several 2015 manifesto pledges, possibly including that for an EU referendum itself were made on the assumption that a Coalition deal with the LibDems would obviate the need to implement them.

The main constraint upon Theresa May’s government will be the tattered Salisbury-Addison convention by which a government is able to force its legislation through the House of Lords if it can demonstrate that it is implementing a manifesto commitment. The 2015 election saw the formation of the first majority Conservative government in history without an automatic majority in the House of Lords.

There has followed a succession of painful Lords defeats for Cameron’s government. But Cameron’s critics argue that far from being inevitable they resulted at least in part from a mishandling of the Lords by a leadership that failed to remember that it could no longer count on the automatic majority it had enjoyed by dint of the support of LibDem as well as Conservative peers for the government during the 2010-15 Coalition. A more subtle and conciliatory approach, they argued, was both possible and would have avoided many unnecessary defeats.

Apart from the risk of making Lords legislation more difficult there is therefore little to bind the new Prime Minister to the constraints of Cameron’s 2015 manifesto other than what Conservative MPs themselves will be prepared to support. Given the commanding authority that the new PM currently enjoys, that is not a strong tie.

On the other side of the equation, is the extent to which the new Prime Minister has a strong new agenda of her own that will overlay and supplant the 2015 manifesto agenda. Having been on the Conservative front-bench for almost all of her parliamentary career, she has had little opportunity to set out her own vision for Britain. Her ability to set out her ambitions during the Conservative leadership campaign was constrained by the rapidity with which the self-immolation of her leadership opponents brought the debate itself to an unexpectedly premature close.

The one significant speech she made – in Birmingham on 11 July – put down several important markers to differentiate her style and potentially the substance of her government from Cameron/Osborne era. Her themes framed an economy and society in which the forces of globalisation were not so much appeased as tamed – a preparedness to take a tougher line on foreign takeovers of strategic UK businesses and “getting tough on irresponsible behaviour in big business”. She spoke of her belief in competitive markets and in strong communities; in individualism and in society; and of the value of the role that the state can play.

It was a clear break with the Manchester Liberalism of George Osborne and an embrace of the more interventionist Birmingham Liberalism of Joe Chamberlain, on whom her joint Chief-of-Staff Nick Timothy has written an important book.

It was Winston Churchill who said of Chamberlain, whose political achievement enabled Conservative governments to win seats in Birmingham for the first time: ‘Joe was the one who made the weather’.

At Conservative Conference in six weeks’ time, appropriately in Birmingham, May will have an opportunity to give a more definitive forecast of what that weather will be. It looks like it could entail a radical break with business policy of recent years. And there is no reason for her to require an election to do so.