‘To those that say the PM should step down,” declares our foreign secretary, “or that we need another election or even, God help us, a second referendum, I say come off it. Get a grip, everyone.” What the rotter means is “kindly leave it to me to choose the moment when I knife my party leader”.

But it is people who think like Boris Johnson who should get a grip. Britain is without a proper government. Our prime minister has lost all credibility with the rest of the European Union. We are leaderless at the most critical time in our history since Suez. Can you believe that David Davis, the Brexit secretary, is about to begin negotiations for Britain’s departure from the EU when, as I write, no agreement about his brief has been reached with the chancellor of the exchequer? Philip Hammond’s dispute with the prime minister over this brief goes to the very heart of its purpose. Mr Davis departs for Brussels with all that pre-election Tory Ukippery still clanking round his neck, and ringing in his ears the echo of a “Downing Street source” who claimed this week that Theresa May’s hard-Brexit speech at Lancaster House in January still holds.

Nobody believes that. What is the point of repeating something that has become nonsensical, just because you said it before?

Can you believe that the Queen is to open parliament next Wednesday though the contents of the Queen’s speech have yet to be agreed with the ghastly Democratic Unionist Party, without whose support the government has no majority? From now on they will be playing with her, very publicly, like a cat tormenting a wounded mouse.

There is no reason to believe these problems can be overcome. Wallowing in the wash of a general election that stripped our prime minister of her authority on the very eve of EU negotiations, neither common sense nor the evidence suggest she can re-establish public confidence. I could belabour you with statistics (at the last count her approval ratings had slipped to minus 34) but invite you, rather, to consider the human reason for these numbers. She is who she is: a good and moral person who wants the best for her country and is not privately unfeeling, but subject to a short-circuiting failure of confidence in her own judgment, and in public is crippled by personal reserve. Everything she now says, every move she makes, will be scrutinised in the media and by her opponents for further confirmation of the flaws we think we’ve spotted.


Not always fairly. Her misjudgment after the Grenfell Tower disaster is a case in point. Of course she felt for those poor victims, just as we all do. But she hates stunts and fears unscripted situations. What if she was heckled by angry residents? London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, took this on the chin and nobody thought the less of him; but she fell prey — as with the TV debate she ducked — to a fatal precaution.

I noticed early her discomfort with the unscripted. Years ago she came to Derby to speak to local Conservative activists. Her speech was warm, well-judged and well-received. Then Edwina Currie, in the audience, asked a critical question about May’s attitude to the police. May went to pieces. Edwina’s question was hardly an Exocet — but one surprise question blew May out of the water.

These things go deep in people. They do not change. In government such a personality can be propped up by a Rolls-Royce of a Downing Street machine, a slavish media, public ignorance and an unassailable parliamentary majority. She benefits from none of these. She has quite simply been rumbled, as were — though more slowly — Ted Heath and Gordon Brown.

For May there is no way back into the public’s love, her colleagues’ respect or the official opposition’s fear. Let me borrow Mr Johnson’s phrasing: to those that say Theresa May can now reinvent herself as an adroit, flexible, listening politician, with a hitherto undiscovered talent for engaging the sympathies of the electorate, I say come off it. Get a grip, everyone.

This prime minister is not viable. One way or another, this week, next week, this autumn or even next year, she is going to crash. Her party know their leader is a busted flush, and the atmosphere among them as the jostling for the succession begins is going to be terrible. They should face the choice: do they re-invent themselves under a new leader now, or do they stick with this doomed brand, waiting to be trashed, week in, week out by news media in whose eyes Tory tragedy is already turning to farce, and by a Labour opposition whose command can only grow as Jeremy Corbyn keeps punching at the bruise that is this prime minister?

Look what happened to John Major, whom people actually liked, who actually had a majority, who continued successfully to steer through an ambitious government programme, but who was forever struggling. His indignities became the subject of public contempt. After five years of this his party was massacred in 1997. That is the prospect, the only prospect, her MPs face as they stagger, squabbling, towards the general election they will so visibly and risibly be trying to stave off. That election could be a massacre of 1997 proportions.

Over the years I’ve come to understand much about politicians, but the answer to one question still eludes me. When they can see they’re going to hell, why do they march on into it? Left, right, left, right, left, right, bang. Why not turn and change their fate?

This is within their power. As a potential prime minister (which in this election he never seemed) Jeremy Corbyn, his nutty prescription for Britain and his spineless MPs who have exchanged all their convictions for a mess of poll-ratings, are so, so beatable. But not under Theresa May’s banner. There is no need and no public appetite for an immediate general election, but under a new leader the party can rediscover confidence in Conservative beliefs and begin its recovery from a fiasco with which she has become indelibly associated. The sooner this happens — next week, this summer, surely before the autumn party conference — the better: before things slide further. But the repair of the party’s and the government’s fortunes cannot begin until a new leader is found.

So certain am I of this judgment that I must even contemplate the grisly likelihood of Boris Johnson’s joining the contenders. This cad can be beaten — but that’s for another day.