It’s become common parlance that Jeremy Corbyn is “out of his depth” and that Theresa May is “up to the job”, so I wasn’t surprised to read the results of a Populus poll this week which collated the words and phrases most associated with each of the main political leaders.

Those were the top two terms included, of course, as well as “stands up for Britain” on May’s side and “principled” on Corbyn’s. Nicola Sturgeon, falling prey to the usual judgement visited upon strong-willed women in powerful positions, was labelled “arrogant” and “smug” (May got “arrogant” too, for the record) while poor Tim Farron was left only with “weird”.

And while people were least likely to describe Theresa May as “down to earth” or “on my side”, they still rated her highly as “competent” – a word which was least likely to be associated with Corbyn. (Corbyn was also, tellingly enough, rated as the least likely leader to be “dishonest”.)

Even before the whole country bought a tired Tory lie about the global recession in 2008 somehow being caused by a Labour MP who left a post-it note, the suggestion that Labour “can’t be trusted with the economy” was well-trodden rhetorical territory. Yet no matter how many Budget targets are missed, financial promises are abandoned or policies are U-turned upon, the Tories have somehow managed to avoid gaining a similar reputation.

Theresa May claims a Jeremy Corbyn government is 'risky'

Positioning Brexit as a “bold step into the future” for Britain, which will deliver economically at some unknowable point in a mysterious future, has allowed the Conservative Party to sidestep the mess that Boris Johnson and his mates walked us into – a mess that comes with a £50bn price tag – and to attack anyone who suggests Brexit might not be an unmitigated success as “unpatriotic”. Perhaps that’s why the final term voters most associated with Theresa May in the Populus poll was “stands up for Britain”.

This week, the extent to which the Prime Minister “stood up for Britain” reached delusional bounds. In a blazing show of patriotism, she suggested that the recent collapse in sterling was nothing to do with Brexit. At a Canary Wharf press conference, she delivered this Donald Trump-esque gem of a paragraph: “If you look at what happened to sterling, sterling had started to fall back before the referendum vote came through. So there have been adjustments to sterling. It isn’t just that sterling has gone down. We’ve seen currencies move around as currencies do.”

Ah yes, as currencies do: go down and up, across, side to side, in concentric circles and patterns, randomly and never in any logical pattern that might seem to be responding to world news. Sometimes I pour the pennies in my coat pocket onto my coffee table after work and they spontaneously arrange themselves into the phrase BREXIT MEANS BREXIT. Currency moves in mysterious ways.

A mere 24 hours after describing Labour’s manifesto as a “fantasy wish list” which would leave a “£58 billion black hole in just one year alone” (yet give the Conservatives a couple of months, a chummy relationship with Nigel Farage and a big red bus with an NHS slogan on the side and they’ll hand you the same deficit in just a few short weeks – that’s efficiency for you), the PM is playing with fire when she makes such spurious claims. In the words of Business Insider’s political editor Adam Bienkov, she really cannot believe her remarks to be true. She was, after all, a Remainer once, one who recognised and said herself that, in the event of Brexit, “London’s position as the world’s financial centre would be in danger” and that our fellow EU member states would never “give Britain a better deal than they themselves enjoy”.

Stating that the drop in sterling had nothing to do with Brexit is a much bigger numbers gaffe than Diane Abbott made during her ill-fated LBC interview, where she blundered over the numbers involved in paying police officers. So why isn’t May being ridiculed to the same extent?

Where are the headlines and the tweets calling the Prime Minister's behaviour “embarrassing”, a “car crash”, her choice of words “tantamount to a meltdown”? Whither the privately educated grown-up Etonites, molly-coddled from cradle to grave, who delight in calling Labour politicians “idealistic” (oh, irony of ironies), “soft” and “out of touch”?

Theresa May put on the spot over Harry Potter

Some serious financial gaffes have been made by the Tories over the last five years: George Osborne’s failure to adequately cut the deficit; David Cameron’s decision to throw the country to the wolves in order to win back voters who had moved to Ukip; Boris Johnson and Michael Gove’s “alternative facts” about Brexit; Theresa May’s cuts to disability payments which led the frustrated and poverty-stricken Kathy Mohan to confront her on the campaign trail this week (“It’s like I’ve got no life, I feel lost. I can’t go anywhere. I’ve got no money. I’ve used the food bank – I’ve never done that before in my life”), not to mention her response which erroneously referred to people with learning difficulties as having problems with their “mental health”.

Here are the cold hard facts: the value of sterling has been damaged by the Brexit vote. The EU’s “divorce bill” will have to be paid. JP Morgan is the latest bank to buy up offices in other European cities (in their case, Dublin) to move their staff into after Brexit. The housing market is tanking, with London seeing the fastest falls in price.

No amount of sloganing and sound-biting, no amount of loudly claiming that all these effects have nothing to do with the Brexit vote can change the situation, and to wilfully continue down a path of delusion is to further damage the country.