Boring and competent Theresa May is what the nation needs after the shock of the Brexit vote

With all the space in British politics opening up before her, a lesser politician might have stumbled – but she strode to the lectern and declared that everything as far as the eye could see was hers

“My pitch is very simple: I’m Theresa May and I’m the best person to be prime minister.” Normally when politicians say that they ought to have the top job they sound conceited and self-regarding. Such as when Michael Gove said: “There were a number of people who had said to me during the course of the week, ‘Michael, it should be you.’”

But when Theresa May said it, towards the end of the launch of her leadership campaign on Thursday, it sounded like a confident statement of fact.

She had earned the right to say it. Before the event, against the cannily chosen backdrop of the library at the Royal United Services Institute, had even started, the first poll of Conservative Party members had put her 17 points ahead of the favourite, Boris Johnson.

Then, just before, came the astonishing news that Gove had decided to destroy Johnson’s campaign before it could even be formally launched.

With all the space in British politics opening up before her, a lesser politician might have stumbled. Instead, she strode to the lectern and declared that everything as far as the eye could see was hers.

She set out a crisp and businesslike manifesto. Brexit means Brexit, but no rush to trigger the process. A Leaver to be Secretary of State negotiating the deal, and no attempt to “wriggle out” of more control of immigration. No election until 2020. Austerity abolished, scrapping George Osborne’s target of budget surplus. No tax rises.

She said who she was: “I know I’m not a showy politician. I don’t tour the television studios. I don’t gossip about people over lunch. I don’t go drinking in Parliament’s bars. I don’t often wear my heart on my sleeve. I just get on with the job in front of me.”

Her speech was half the length of Gove’s the next day and then she asked for questions. She was in charge and in good humour. She had a good line about Johnson’s negotiating skills: “The last time he did a deal with the Germans he came back with three nearly new water cannon.”

And when Nicholas Watt of Newsnight asked whether her pitch was that, as a Remainer she could deliver Leave, her spontaneous answer cut through. Yes, she is the best person to be prime minister, I thought.

After the huge shock of the Brexit vote, the nation is looking for steadiness, competence and negotiating skills. She may be boring. She may lack the agility and rhetorical skill that shines in the House of Commons. I remember debates between her and Yvette Cooper, for long her Labour shadow, of thundering tedium.

But boring and competent may be what the moment needs. She has the right background. Daughter of a vicar in Oxfordshire. Went to a Roman Catholic private school although her parents were Anglicans, and then to a girls’ grammar school which became a comprehensive while she was there.

Met her husband at a Conservative student disco at Oxford University. He is a fund manager; she worked at the Bank of England; they have no children, which is something that “just didn’t happen”, she said four years ago. “This isn’t something I generally go into, but things just turned out as they did.” Definitely no heart on sleeve.

As a politician, elected to Parliament in 1997, she made a striking start as a moderniser – her warning against being seen as the nasty party was the early template for David Cameron’s “detoxification of the Tory brand”. After being becalmed in the middle ranks of opposition politics, she suddenly emerged after the 2010 as Secretary of State for the truncated Home Office (John Reid spun off the Justice Department as his last act as Home Secretary three years earlier).

Always, always the most underrated quality in politics is the avoidance of mistakes, and she avoided them by sheer hard work, attention to detail and force of will. As a result she is now the longest-serving Home Secretary since James Chuter Ede in 1951, with a record to boast about, which she did on Thursday:

“As Home Secretary, I was told I couldn’t take on the Police Federation, but I did. I was told I couldn’t cut police spending without crime going up, but crime is lower than ever. I was told I shouldn’t start asking questions about police corruption, but everywhere I’ve seen it – from Stephen Lawrence to Hillsborough – I’ve exposed it. I was told I couldn’t stop Gary McKinnon’s extradition, but I stood up to the American Government and I stopped it. I was told I couldn’t deport Abu Qatada, but I flew to Jordan and negotiated the treaty that got him out of Britain for good.”

She also failed spectacularly to meet the Government’s target to cut net immigration to 100,000 a year, but everyone knew that that was Cameron’s foolish promise and that it simply could not be delivered as long as the UK was part of the free movement of EU workers.

Curiously, therefore, even her failure works to her advantage, because she understands immigration policy and plainly wants to deliver what the people voted for in the referendum.

The significance of Thursday’s YouGov poll was not just that she could beat Boris Johnson, but that she, a Remainer, was more trusted to deliver the Brexit deal than he was.

With Johnson now left for dust, she is left to face a more familiar rival: Gove and she have fought a long-running feud through the Whitehall machine. Their most serious clash was over Islamist radicalisation in schools when Gove was at Education, when May formed the same low opinion of Gove’s brilliant and reckless adviser, Dominic Cummings, as the Prime Minister.

Neither Gove nor Cummings should be written off, and the last time we had a nailed-on favourite (48 hours ago) it all went wrong, but May looks set for a steady progress to No 10 over the next 10 weeks.

And then her problems really start. Delivering Brexit is a huge technical challenge. She may be the best person to try to do it and yet still fail.