So it’s back to Brexit today for the floundering Tory campaign. The firm hand of Sir Lynton is back on the tiller. The barnacles have been chiselled off the hull of HMS Theresa, the bilges pumped clear of the dementia tax. One week out from polling day, dawn has broken on an election campaign that has turned into the greatest act of political hubris since 1923, when Stanley Baldwin called a premature election and let in the first minority Labour government. Winston Churchill declared it the kind of catastrophe that only befalls a great nation after defeat on the battlefield.

The extent of the disaster was explicit during last night’s BBC debate. The jibes at the expense of the absent leader by Caroline Lucas and Tim Farron were greeted with cheers and laughter, not – as Boris Johnson is claiming – because of a lefty conspiracy by the BBC, but because Theresa May’s headline achievement this past month has been to create a stage on which Jeremy Corbyn can woo the sympathies of almost everyone who wants politics to be different.

This was supposed to be a coronation. On 19 June, when Brexit negotiations are due to begin, May was supposed to ride to Brussels like Wellington after Waterloo, leaving the Brexit naysayers strewn over the fields of Hougoumont farm. May’s strategic competence would have delivered a once-in-a-generation parliamentary victory. Labour would be left mortally wounded. And May would be playing for the bonus of a mandate to change the nature of Conservatism.

The Tory share of the vote is holding up. The gap is narrowing because Labour’s has grown dramatically

There are lots of reasons why this was almost certainly never going to work, starting with the lunatic idea that she could be cast as a charismatic leader. To build a whole election campaign around one person who is so clearly lacking essential all crowd-pleasing skills indicates a striking lack of awareness. But there is a more profound and serious flaw in the strategy. Everyone who has ever worked with her acknowledges that May’s preferred style of operating is in a tight group of trusted friends. This was damagingly clear when several senior colleagues were still defending the uncapped, manifesto version of the dementia tax hours after the decision had been made to reverse it.

To have the slightest chance of justifying her original election claim – that this was nothing to do with having a sustained 20-point lead in the polls, but instead was a vote to establish her democratic authority before she went into the smoke-filled rooms of the Brexit negotiations – she needed to be clear about what she would be asking for. She needed plans for big questions like the rights of EU citizens in the UK, what controlled migration actually means for the gaps in the UK labour force, and a coherent description of the future of food and farming. She needed to trust her cabinet colleagues to go out and argue for them. Show, don’t tell.

She and her team assumed that a presidential contest fought on the single issue of Jeremy Corbyn’s competence would deliver her a three-figure majority. Instead, Labour’s campaign, as well as Corbyn himself, has been conspicuously competent from the start.

Whatever the bookies might be saying this morning after the latest shock poll from YouGov putting the Tories only 3 points ahead, Labour has not won. May is no longer venturing out on marauding raids into Labour marginals in the north-west, but consolidating support in Tory marginals in the south-west (although as the video from the Plymouth Herald suggests, that’s no triumph either) .

But a quick look at what the polling wizard David Cowling calls the fundamentals reveals the following: the Tory share of the vote is holding up. The gap is narrowing because Labour’s has grown dramatically. A lot of Labour support comes from young voters, who are historically less likely to actually do what they say. There are far more 65+ voters (who turn out, and vote Tory) than 18-24s. And while Corbyn’s approval ratings are much, much better than they were, they are still -11 and May’s are still +9. It’s not impossible. But nor, really and truly, is it likely.

Even if May does win a safe majority, this is no personal victory. She has exposed the weaknesses of her style of politics to the country. Her efforts to appear on the side of the worker are a charade when accompanied by continued austerity, failing hospitals and cash-starved schools. Her MPs may be relieved to be safe, but no one has gained from this nasty, mean, vituperative campaign. She has earned little loyalty, let alone love.

Over the next six days, Theresa May will try to rebuild support behind the empress of Brexit model. She hopes to consolidate the alliance with Ukip that she won with her dramatic post-referendum conversion. Maybe this move was always on the campaign grid. But now it’s all she has left.