...but will charge of disloyalty return to sink her yet again?

ANDREA Leadsom’s resignation completed an extraordinary circle of loyalty and disloyalty.

During the party’s 2016 leadership contest, she was unexpectedly in a final runoff with Theresa May. In a most unsisterly interview, she knifed Mrs May by suggesting that being a mother of three children gave her more of a ‘stake in the future’ than her childless rival.

Amid the subsequent row, Mrs Leadsom withdrew from the race, clearing the way for Mrs May to become the Prime Minister

Despite the crass comment, as PM Mrs May promoted Mrs Leadsom to the Cabinet as Environment Secretary and then moved her to be Leader of the Commons because she had been out of her depth in the first post.

Mrs Leadsom repaid her boss with unswerving loyalty in a job that was pivotal to the fortunes of a government with no working Commons majority. She won admirers with her accomplished performances at the Despatch Box and on the media, and for the way she stood up to the unpopular and increasingly autocratic Commons Speaker.

Mrs Leadsom was very careful to cultivate the air of loyalty.

After the Chequers summit last summer where the PM’s EU Withdrawal Deal was unveiled and several ministers were said to have condemned the document, she declared: ‘But Prime Minister I will support you.’

When David Davis and Boris Johnson resigned, she decided she would have more clout and a higher profile if she stayed in the Cabinet rather than tried to compete on the backbenches with those two bigger beasts.

It was a shrewd move. In the last six months, Tory MPs have talked of her again as a potential leader.

In public she was always on-message, but reports have emerged of her being increasingly critical in Cabinet on Brexit. Indeed, few colleagues were surprised by the cynical timing of her resignation.

One of the Cabinet’s most prominent Brexiteers, her leadership campaign has been under way behind the scenes for at least 12 months. An accomplished cook, she’s entertained to dinner an

estimated 170 MPs from all wings of the Tory parliamentary party at her Westminster home.

Charming photos of her with her husband and children, which appeared over the weekend, suggested she was stepping up her campaign.

Cabinet supporters include the Education Secretary Damian Hinds. If Penny Mordaunt, the first female Defence Secretary and a fellow Brexiteer, doesn’t run as leader herself, there is talk she will be on Team Leadsom.

Mrs Leadsom, 56, has an iron conviction that she is destined to follow in the footsteps of fellow grammar schoolgirl Margaret Thatcher. Like the former prime minister, she had a modest upbringing. Home was a small terraced house in Berkshire. Her mother Judy divorced her builder’s merchant father when she was four, and then brought up three girls while studying to become a nurse.

Mrs Leadsom’s supporters cheekily believe that by walking out of the Cabinet at such a critical moment, she will be given the credit for Mrs May’s resignation. They hope she might have stolen a march on better-known rivals.

Alternatively, the charge of disloyalty may return to sink her again.