Time

When Tony Blair relinquished power in 2007, there was speculation that he had wanted to surpass the term served by Margaret Thatcher. In turn, Theresa May finally announced a departure date which guaranteed her a longer record of service than Gordon Brown. Like Brown, she will remain prime minister while others in Westminster choose her successor.

Power

Theresa May’s greatest gamble as prime minister was calling an election in 2017 which she hoped would shore up her then meagre parliamentary majority and give her a stronger mandate to negotiate a withdrawal agreement with the EU. In fact it left her reliant on the DUP to pass budgets. When the Northern Irish unionists then withdrew their support on Brexit because of fears that the “backstop” would mean a customs border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, May went on to suffer some of the worst parliamentary defeats on record. Both pro- and anti-Europeans in her own party joined the opposition in repeatedly voting down her withdrawal agreement. (For history buffs: the Campbell case vote was a defeat for the Labour government of the time over a suppressed inquiry into a communist journalist.)

People

May’s government was always an uneasy coalition of Brexiters – to whom she gave all the Brexit-related jobs – and remainers or pro-Europeans, most notably Philip Hammond, the chancellor. So it was no surprise that the tensions would lead to resignations on both sides as the pendulum of the negotiations swung from hard to soft. But even without that, May’s workforce was particularly unreliable; Brexiter Priti Patel was forced out of the Department for International Development over unorthodox meetings with the Israeli military, and two close May allies, Damian Green and Michael Fallon, resigned over allegations of inappropriate sexual advances.

Money

The sterling exchange rate closely tracked the market’s reaction to May’s Brexit approach over her three years in office. When she signalled a harder stance, as with her Lancaster House speech ruling out a customs union, the value of the pound fell. When agreement with the EU seemed near, or parliament forcefully rejected no-deal, the pound rose. Although Donald Trump’s combative trade policies and an Italian budget crisis meant that the dollar and the euro were also volatile, the pound rarely moved significantly unless nudged by Brexit developments.

Respect

May’s promise at the beginning of her term was to serve all Britons, but a series of domestic crises severely undermined the impression she set out to give. First the tragedy of Grenfell Tower, and then the scandal over the treatment of the Windrush generation combined with Brexit and continuing austerity to keep May’s approval ratings low. In the final months, the increasing evidence of powerlessness brought it crashing down.