Mrs May must make her party the Brexit party and stick to its core values

Utter, abject incompetence is the new normal in British politics, and that could yet prove the Conservative Party’s saving grace. Not since Lord North was prime minister in the 18th century has Britain been governed so appallingly, and yet the Tories could paradoxically still end up crushing Labour and winning the next election with a massive majority. As Friedrich Nietzsche put it in Beyond Good and Evil, “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”

For now, at least, Jeremy Corbyn’s failings as a political strategist are proving to be even more crippling than Theresa May’s. His first misjudgment was to have underestimated the potency of what he wrongly calls “Blairism” – in reality, European-style social-democracy of a kind practised by Gordon Brown.

Corbyn also confused the increasing distrust of capitalism caused by the housing crisis and stagnant wages with an embrace of his own toxic brew of radical socialism, cultural Marxism, tolerance of anti-Semites and support for enemies of the West such as Shamima Begum, the jihadi bride. The fact that many voters want to renationalise the railways doesn’t mean they aspire to live in a council home or want the police to be soft on crime. The public is simultaneously more Left-wing and more Right-wing than those used to traditional ideological divides tend to realise.