Mother Theresa has managed to make Corbyn look good. That’s a truly staggering achievement

THereSA MAY was riding for a fall from the moment she decided to call the election. That’s what happens when you start believing your own publicity.

Swept along by polls predicting a crushing three-figure majority, she threw her natural caution to the wind and staked everything on a coronation. if we’ve learned one thing in recent years, it’s not to trust the polls.

She should have seen this coming. Some of us warned from the off that it had the potential to blow up in her face, especially during a ridiculously long campaign lasting more than seven weeks.

This may have seemed a straightforward choice between a popular Prime Minister determined to implement the will of the people and an opposition led by a hapless irA-loving, Hezbollah-worshipping north london Trot, wedded to sky-high taxes and suffocating state control.

But the headline figures don’t always tell the full story. There was no guarantee that former ukip voters would switch to the Tories. And come election time, old tribal labour loyalties were always likely to kick back in.

At the beginning of this campaign, i drew a parallel between Mother Theresa and grocer Heath — until now the worst Tory prime minister in living memory.

Heath went to the country in 1974 on the question of who runs Britain: the government or the unions? He didn’t get the answer he was looking for.

And neither did May — although she might have romped home had she limited the campaign to three weeks, to coincide with the local elections, and stuck to the script.

This was supposed to be a singleissue election, about Brexit and nothing else. Soon it became about everything

but Brexit. whoever heard of a ‘snap’ election which lasts the thick end of two months? Policies inevitably expanded to fill the time available on the rolling news channels.

As the election progressed, a nauseating cult of personality grew up around the Prime Minister. The Tory campaign morphed into one designed to install May as an absolute monarch.

YeT the more she made the election all about her, the less she had to do with the common herd, conducting her ‘ rallies’ in a hermetically sealed bubble.

while she was wise to avoid the stagemanaged Tv slanging matches with the muppets from the minor parties, she also ran scared of going head- to- head with Jeremy Corbyn.

That didn’t make her look presidential, it made her look weak. in interviews with Andrew neil and Jeremy Paxman, she came across as humourless, wooden and slow-witted.

The more people saw of her, the less they liked her.

May and her handlers ran a staggeringly stupid and inept campaign, driven by hubris. it takes a special kind of arrogance to alienate your natural supporters and attempt to appeal to those who have never voted Conservative in their lives.

who thought it was a good idea to upset pensioners and those worried about paying for care in their old age? Presumably the same clowns who supported Spreadsheet Phil’s ridiculous attempts to soak the self-employed and screw small businesses in his subsequently aborted Budget.

May managed to persuade herself that middle-class, Middle england was in the bag and she concentrated her efforts on winning over voters in labour heartlands in the north.

The assumption that workingclass men and women who had voted leave in the referendum would suddenly switch allegiance to the Tories was deluded.

Yet in order to ‘reach out’ to this previously elusive demographic, she recklessly junked large chunks of Conservative philosophy and embraced pseudosocialist policies.

All Mrs May seemed to care about was securing her place in history and being remembered for boldly going where no Tory had gone before.

Scratch the surface, though, and the absurd notion that she was ‘strong and stable’ never stood up to serious scrutiny. Ask anyone who had dealings with her during the six years she was Home Secretary. ‘Bloody difficult woman’ wasn’t meant as a compliment.

May earned a reputation for dithering and caution, bordering on cowardice, coupled with a stubborn refusal to take advice from outside her own sycophantic inner circle. She spent the referen- dum campaign hiding behind the sofa, emerging only after Call Me dave fell on his sword when he failed to persuade us to remain.

She got the job by default, after the rest of the leadership candidates formed a circular firing squad in a fit of mutually assured destruction. i never thought she was up to it in the first place.

MAY owed her elevation to the fallout from the Brexit vote. That should have been her number one priority — her only priority.

we might also have expected a degree of humility and gratitude. Yet as soon as she moved into no 10, she started to behave as if she owned the place.

even though she was an Accidental Prime Minister, she convinced herself that she had the right to tear up everything which had gone before.

Meanwhile, the focus on Brexit began to drift. She should have triggered Article 50 — the formal process of leaving the eu — on the day she moved into downing Street. if she had, we’d be halfway down the road to the departure gate by now.

instead, she kept making excuses as to why the time wasn’t right — in the process handing the initiative to the rebellious remainers determined to derail Brexit at any price. it took her nine wasted months to trigger Article 50, by which time much of the impetus had been lost.

we’ll never know for sure if she really did call this election to scupper the remainers. My firm suspicion is that she saw a golden opportunity to reinforce her grip on power and took it, assuming that labour was unelectable and the result was never in doubt.

instead, the campaign dragged on, and on, and on, with every new day bringing another pointless policy initiative, giving her opponents a new line of attack.

Some of the mud will have stuck, especially among voters who were already sick and tired of the interminable election campaign.

gradually, the air of invincibility and inevitability she had tried to cultivate withered and died. The truth is that it was always a mistake to confuse her massive early leads in the opinion polls with any wild excitement for her personally. Those of us who decided to vote for her anyway did so without enthusiasm.

in my own north london constituency, her growing unpopularity cost a decent young Tory MP, a family man with six kids, his relatively safe seat.

even Amber rudd, the Home Secretary, sent out like a lamb to the slaughter to defend May in the Tv debates, only just managed to cling to her seat by the varnish on her fingernails.

This was the worst performance since my own beloved Tottenham Hotspur managed to finish third in a two- horse race for the Premiership two seasons ago.

Pretty impressive, given that at one stage Theresa was supposed to be on course for a majority in the region of 140.

if the campaign had lasted any longer, there may have been the nightmare prospect of Corbyn being installed as Prime Minister, bolstered by wee Burney’s Toytown Tartanistas, the lib dems and the welsh cottage burners.

Miraculously, though, she’s still there, thanks to the ulster unionists and the magnificent Tory revival in Scotland — which is some small consolation to those of us who believe in the union.

WHere Theresa goes from here is anybody’s guess. listening to her outside downing Street yesterday, she seems to think it is business as usual.

The fact is she’s damaged goods, but we’re stuck with her for the time being. Surely not even the Tories are insane enough to launch a leadership battle when they can’t command a working majority in the Commons.

For now, we can only hope that Theresa can somehow redeem herself by forcing through the unambiguous Brexit that 17 million of us were entitled to expect when we voted leave last June. But i wouldn’t hold your breath.

May has handed the initiative to the saboteurs, first by prolonging the agony before triggering Article 50, then by calling an unnecessarily protracted election campaign, which allowed her opponents to keep changing the subject and relegate Brexit to a sideshow. no wonder they’re crowing now.

My own view is that Theresa’s already dead in the water. it’s just a matter of time before they haul the body away, but it’s not going to be pretty.

She thoroughly warrants all the opprobrium being heaped on her today, and deserves to be reviled in the same terms as the appalling grocer Heath.

not only did she manage to lose the Tories their working majority, potentially scuppering Brexit in the process, she has contrived, astonishingly, to make Jeremy Corbyn an attractive alternative Prime Minister in the eyes of 40 per cent of the British electorate.

A campaign which began with her intending to drive a stake through the heart of labour has ended with her giving it the kiss of life.

And nobody saw that coming.