Theresa May had her shortcomings – but Brexit will be just as big a burden for her successor

The next Tory leader has the opportunity to either keep the Groundhog Day nightmare alive for a few more months; or to draw breath and admit that departure could be impossible

Chances are that future historians will be kinder to Theresa May than her contemporaries. They could hardly not be.

Today there seems to be a very negative consensus about Ms May. In the pantheon of British premiers stretching back to the origins of the prime ministership with Robert Walpole in the 18th century, few have less to show for their time in office, displayed worse judgement and, most grievously of all in the present context of Brexit, were quite as blatant about placing party before country.

There are mitigating factors, as there always are. The most convincing is the sense that when the Conservative Party refuses to be led, then it cannot be led. Ms May joins a long line of her predecessors who were destroyed, partially or wholly, by Europe. She will not be the last.

Still, the mood at present is not to give Ms May the benefit of the doubt. Too often she behaved as the party leader she ceases to be now; and too seldom a national leader when it was most urgently demanded.

In the premier league rankings, she is down there with Lord North, who lost the American colonies; Neville Chamberlain, architect of the appeasement of Hitler; Anthony Eden, author of the Suez disaster; and, more contentiously, David Cameron, the man who gifted Britain its In/Out EU referendum, and so complacently assumed it would be won.

Brexit made Ms May prime minister; and it broke her. When Mr Cameron and the Remain campaign unexpectedly lost, albeit narrowly, in June 2016, it was inevitable – despite his previous pledges to the contrary – that he would quit, and the opportunity would arise for his then-home secretary to run for the highest office. It was to be the “honour of my life” for this daughter of a country vicar and granddaughter of domestic servants.

True, it was not inevitable that her main rivals, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Andrea Leadsom would spectacularly self-combust in the space of a few days, but Ms May’s perceived qualities suddenly fell more sharply into relief.

Against the backstabbing politics-as-a-game public schoolboys that populated the Cameron administration, she was the kind of hard-working grammar school girl who would conscientiously get the country through the complexities of Brexit. She would thus always have had a very good chance of winning. Even her enemies praise her ethos of public service; she would have made a far better civil servant or high official at the Bank of England, where her working life began, than she was to prove as a campaigning politician.

Without Brexit and the EU referendum, Sir David Cameron’s plan A, would have gone ahead: a graceful retirement by now, the thanks of a grateful nation, the Garter, and a transition to some suitable Cameroon (George Osborne, most likely, or possibly Mr Gove) would have gone ahead, and the UK would today be a saner and calmer place than it now is.

That is speculation. What’s certain is that Brexit dominated her premiership in a way that even she could not have foreseen. She did, it is only fair to acknowledge, actually achieve a “deal”, of sorts. The withdrawal agreement, political declaration and assorted addenda she agreed with the EU were fully ratified by 27 nations – but not, of course, by the House of Commons. Or, more to the point, were rejected by a significant section of her own party.

She tried three times to get her deal through, and lost, by historic margins. It was a mercy that her own cabinet and backbenchers, via their 1922 Committee, stopped her trying for fourth time. Far too much time was wasted by Ms May in attempting to alter closed minds on all sides of the house. She should have thrown the towel in sooner; her doggedness, which might in other times have been a virtue, simply became a terrible exercise in masochism.

Ms May, then, was not a flexible performer – a trait seen throughout her career, and particularly during her tenure at the Home Office. It was there that she and her ill-chosen “terrible twin” special advisers, Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy, went around Whitehall picking fights; where Ms May purposely undermined and excluded her Liberal Democrat ministers of state during the coalition; and where she engineered the “hostile environment” for migration and incubated the Windrush scandal.

Colleagues from the time as disparate as George Osborne, Sir Vince Cable and Mr Gove testify to her abrasiveness. A politician Ken Clarke, half-admiringly, called “a bloody difficult woman” was not well-suited to a task that demanded gargantuan diplomatic gifts and political management. Perhaps in easier, happier, times she would have been a competent, if not especially likeable, leader.

“Strong and stable” she was not. Her greatest misjudgement was the snap election of 2017 – one that she and her staff had repeatedly denied was ever going to happen. Dreamed up on a walking holiday with the only person she has been able to trust throughout her career, her husband Philip, it carried a powerful logic.

Armed only with the small overall majority bequeathed to her by Mr Cameron, she figured that to get the Brexit legislation through, she would need a much larger body of MPs loyal to her and who owed their seats and majorities to her personally. Every commentator agreed that she would win a landslide and that the Labour Party, run by the apparent no-hoper Jeremy Corbyn, would be smashed – 1983 all over again.

The reality was a catastrophic defeat. No one saw it coming, least of all Ms May, who could be seen for the first time after the disaster was apparent, looking disconsolate at her constituency declaration in Maidenhead. She was filmed, incongruously, in the company of a couple of joke candidates, an outsized Elmo from Sesame Street and Lord Buckethead – such is the levelling power of British parliamentary democracy. It summed up the parody of a campaign she had just run. After the meaningless “Brexit means Brexit”, “Nothing has changed” became her new catchphrase when her social-care policy fell apart. It was then only a short hop to the party conference speech that was more coughed than spoken, the prankster handing her a P45, the letters falling off the backdrop slogan (“Building a country that works for everyone”), and her chancellor lending her a Locket.

Returning as a minority administration in a hung parliament, it was at that point that Ms May should have reached out to other parties on Brexit, and sought to forge a consensus on the way forward. That is with hindsight, of course. It is also correct to observe that, then as now, the Labour Party would have been, in reality, reluctant to help her deliver a “Tory Brexit” if it spied an opportunity to foment trouble and bring on a general election.

That cross-party approach could have been just as doomed as what Ms May did decide to try – which was to appease the hard men and women of the European Research Group, and the Northern Irish Democratic Unionists. Her pact with the DUP also made restoring stable democracy to Northern Ireland that much harder.

So she made her mistakes. No one saw how ill at ease and awkward this shy woman would be on the stump, say, or comforting the victims and families after the Grenfell disaster. She lacked the empathy that people thought she had when she talked about righting “burning injustices”.

However, the fundamental truth about Brexit is that it is wrong to make her the scapegoat for the mess. Brexit did not fail simply because Ms May proved to be a brittle and flat-footed negotiator, both with the European Commission and the House of Commons.

The internal contradictions of the British approach to Brexit always made failure inevitable. Her successor now has the opportunity to either keep the Groundhog Day nightmare of the May premiership alive for a few more months; or to draw breath, admit that departure in October, if ever, is impossible because parliament will veto it and think again about the UK’s relationship with the EU.

Ms May’s successor will not come up with anything better than her deal. They will, thus, make her look good. As bad as things are now, and as disappointing as the May premiership has been, the next occupant of No 10 could easily be even worse.