And they cannot afford another dud leader

It takes genuine skill to be this bad at politics, to simultaneously repel old and young, Remainers and Brexiteers, urbanites and rural dwellers, Left and Right. In years to come, political scientists will study Theresa May’s time in office with morbid fascination, dissecting her unique knack for alienating every group of voter bar none.

They will reflect on her broken promises, her breathtakingly poor communication skills, her self-imposed isolation, her pointless micro-management, her abject inability to lead, her squandering of one of the greatest opportunities for political realignment in British history.

Their conclusion, surely, will be that never before had such a mediocre apparatchik been so over-promoted, landing us with a prime minister entirely unsuited to the art of statecraft. They will wonder how she remained for so long in Downing Street at a time when somebody truly exceptional was required, and why her party failed to remove her, even after it had become clear that she was taking the Tories to the brink of annihilation.

Lord North, who gave away the New World colonies, was a far more plausible leader: in any case, American independence was one of the best things ever to happen to the world. Robert Peel split his party and robbed it of a majority for 30 years, but delivered the extraordinary bounty that was free trade.