Last time she hit the campaign trail, Theresa May demolished her poll lead. Why on earth is she doing it again? May’s tour to sell her Brexit deal to the nation is a poor use of the days before the 11 December vote

The snap general election left Conservatives with a variety of deep-seated complexes. The sight of a podium on Downing Street is enough to inspire cold sweats. The word ‘manifesto’ leaves MPs and candidates twitching. And the phrase “Theresa May goes on the campaign trail” inspires a peculiar horror, sufficient – even all these months later – to induce a full-body cringe.

‘No Tory can forget the sight of a Prime Minister in her pomp demolishing her poll lead through sheer force of personality’

No Tory can forget the sight of a Prime Minister in her pomp demolishing her own 20-point poll lead in a mere seven weeks through sheer force of personality.

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Campaigning is not her strong suit

If you want to get some insight into the experience, imagine someone you really love has got a place on Masterchef. You tune in, eager to see them perform. It starts well – they confidently demonstrate their technical skills, describe a mouth-watering recipe, line up their amazing ingredients, then accidentally set fire to all of it, on camera, before informing the horrified judges that “nothing has changed”. There, that wince you just did is about the right sensation.

For this reason it is a bit surprising to hear that the Prime Minister intends to promote her proposed EU deal by hitting the road, in the hope of selling her vision of Brexit to the nation.

May has strengths – you don’t become Home Secretary by being talentless. Nor do you survive the role, or its very own hostile environment, for a record time without determination and grit. But it is hardly controversial to say that campaigning is not her most comfortable territory.

Like any MP, she has knocked on innumerable doors over the years, and she is genuinely warm and witty in person, but the nation saw her struggle to translate that on camera last year. The sensation that the wheels were coming off her campaign visibly made the experience even worse as time went by.

It’s far from certain that sending May out on an election-style campaign will help the standing of her deal.

Who is this aimed at?

Even if she were to put in a more assured and comfortable performance than in 2017, the intended audience for such a tour isn’t clear. Who exactly is meant to show up to hear her pitch?

Roll up, roll up, to see the Amazing Turd-Polishing Woman! You won’t believe your eyes – and, many Brexiteers mutter, you can’t necessarily believe all of her words, either.

Many who once invested their faith in her are disillusioned; almost 70 per cent of Conservative Party members now oppose her position, while Tory voters and Brexiteers don’t appear much more keen. Former Remainers and second-referendum obsessives are not exactly flocking to join Team May.

Her most promising audience is the “BOBs”, those Bored Of Brexit, whom Downing Street hopes will welcome something, anything, which might let us all talk about something else. But even if this group do like her plan – which is not guaranteed – they are unlikely to be very engaged, for the obvious reason that their unifying feature is boredom. A campaign aimed at enthusing the apathetic sounds as well-conceived as hiring Donald Trump to voice the audiobook of The Handmaid’s Tale.

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Her real problem is backbench MPs

That is not even the biggest problem with Downing Street’s scheme. Hitting the campaign trail, splashing taxpayers’ money on online advertising, and debating Jeremy Corbyn on nation television is an attempt to speak to a mass audience. But the masses will not decide the fate of May’s deal, or her premiership. MPs will, in a House of Commons vote on Tuesday 11 December.

With only a few days to go before that crucial decision, the Prime Minister is yet to convince scores of her own backbenchers, never mind the DUP or the waverers on the Labour benches whom she would need in order to construct a majority.

It’s always the case that a group of ten MPs will have at least a dozen different opinions on a topic, and this issue is particularly vexed. Backbenchers on all sides have numerous legal, practical, and party political concerns about May’s deal, few of which have yet received reassuring or convincing answers. The Government’s battle to resist releasing the full legal advice on what the deal means has fuelled, not quenched, those concerns.

So why is the Prime Minister appealing to the country at large, a medium in which she is visibly uncomfortable, when the decision will be taken in Westminster by a few hundred politicians on the basis of the detail rather than the mood music? There’s only really one explanation: she has run out of other options, and is increasingly running short of Parliamentary allies.

Mark Wallace is Executive Editor at ConservativeHome.com