On Friday, Prime Minister Theresa May announced that she will be resigning in two weeks. It came as little surprise. After nearly three years in office, the Brexit Prime Minister failed to deliver Brexit and now leaves her country with more division and less direction than when she started. History may not be kind, but hopefully it will be nuanced. While her errors were hers alone, her failures were not. In truth, the prime minister was put in an impossible position which neither she nor, likely, her successor could ever escape.

It’s not hard to come up with examples of where May went wrong. Upon becoming prime minister in 2016, she framed the Brexit debate in a way that ultimately spelled her ruin. “No deal is better than a bad deal,” May often said, threatening to pull the U.K. out of the EU with no trade framework if favorable concessions were not made. It was a bluff which the EU called by refusing to give her the terms her party would have recognized as a good deal. But at the same time, it was a bluff which her party bizarrely believed. Ignoring the evidence that it would force the U.K. to face a food shortage, a financial crisis, and violence at the Irish border, her party became hell-bent on a “hard” Brexit, hoping to leave the EU without membership in the single market, without membership in the customs union, or even without a deal. Ultimately, each of May’s three Brexit deals would be shot down by her own MPs—each because they were not hard enough.

May also decided to freeze out her opposition. Brexit, she determined, would become an in-house project for the Conservatives who enjoyed a majority in Parliament. Three long years later, however, the Conservatives were too fractured to function and May had to commit herself to a cross-party compromise. But it was too little, too late. Even last week, when she capitulated on everything the Conservatives cared about—conceding not only that the U.K. would remain in a customs arrangement with the EU, but also that parliament could vote to hold a second referendum—the ill will she had created with Labour could not be forgiven. That fourth Brexit bill was quietly pulled from the floor last week before she faced a final rejection, but not before the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn spoke out against it and her one last time.

In the 2017 snap election, May bet the house and lost, squandering her party’s majority and binding her party to an extreme right wing.

Above all, there was the blunder of the 2017 snap election. Shortly after taking office, May decided to call for a general election that could build up an even greater majority for the Conservatives in the House of Commons, who already held a 98-seat advantage over Labour. It backfired. The Conservatives went on to lose thirteen seats as Labour won thirty. May lost her parliamentary majority and was forced to enter into a coalition with the Democratic Unionist Party, a tiny Northern Irish group with extreme far right positions. Worse still, by bringing the DUP into a governing coalition, May brought out Brexit’s most intractable problem: the Irish border crisis. In the 2017 snap election, May bet the house and lost, squandering her party’s majority and binding her party to an extreme right wing. Nearly ever difficulty since then has been a product of that decision, a decision she made alone.

Even before her accession to the post of prime minister, May was contributing to the current political climate and to the problems that pulled her down. As Home Secretary under Prime Minister David Cameron, she established the “hostile environment policy” which saw the deportations and departures of over 250,000 people while she held the post. Her policies also helped produce the “Windrush Scandal” in which the subjects of former colonies—people born British citizens and now living in Britain—were stripped of their legal rights, detained, and in many cases deported. She played a part in a number of more peripheral outrages too: a stiff requirement for gay asylum seekers to prove they were gay, leading some to film themselves having sex; a van with billboards that threatened “Go Home or Face Arrest” circling through the mixed race neighborhoods of London; and a censorship plan, which failed, but which proposed that broadcasters submit their daily news programs for government review in the name of counter-extremism.