Nick TIMOTHY

Mrs May had no choice but to promise her resignation, but she can now also claim a more positive legacy

Like the leadership campaign that made her Prime Minister, Theresa May’s premiership has been truncated, suddenly but inevitably, by forces beyond her control.

She did not want to announce her departure from Downing Street in this way. She did not really want to say she was going at all. But her resignation, she only reluctantly judged, was the price worth paying to persuade Conservative MPS to back her EU Withdrawal Agreement.

Many Tory Leavers are starting to accept the inevitable as they realise that, as bad as the Prime Minister’s deal is, it is the best remaining form of Brexit possible.

Indeed, many now accept that voting for her deal is the only way to ensure Brexit definitely happens.

And the Prime Minister’s promise to go will persuade more rebels to back down. None the less, her tactic might still fail. A core of Conservative Leavers – and about 10 Tory Remainers who support a second referendum – will still vote against her Brexit deal.

We do not yet know if there are enough Labour MPS willing to defy their whips to get the deal over the line. And the Speaker continues to make menacing noises about blocking a third attempt to pass the same motion.

It was the right call, however, for the Prime Minister to say she will go, for the simple reason that she had no other choice. Her authority over her hopelessly divided parliamentary party is shot. Her ability to lead her equally divided Government has gone. Her domestic agenda – once fresh and exciting – evaporated after the 2017 general election.

Anything truly worth delivering

– a rebalanced regional economy, for example, or a dramatic shift in the balance between labour and capital – requires political strength that she does not have.

If Parliament votes to delay Brexit until 2020, there is no way the Prime Minister could have led Britain through that extension. It would mark an emphatic defeat of her negotiating strategy, but worse, it would herald a second referendum.

The country would need a new negotiator, and in a referendum the Conservatives would require a figurehead who truly believes in leaving the EU.

If MPS impose an alternative to her deal – a customs union, perhaps – constitutional convention suggests that another general election will be necessary, since there is no democratic mandate for such a policy.

In this Parliament of deceitful and hypocritical Remainers, constitutional convention might easily be ignored, but either way, a customs union or a Norway-style relationship with the European Union would bring the Conservative Party to the brink of rupture.

Perhaps Mrs May would have had enough time to sign the amended treaty, but she would have been unable to cling to office for long.

Even if the Commons approves her deal, the Prime Minister will – regardless of last night’s announcement – have succeeded in a manner that makes her own political demise inevitable. Her victory would come at the cost of forcing MPS to vote for something they hate, and on the issue many care most about.

The idea that they would have trusted her to lead the party and the country through the second stage of the negotiations was simply fatuous.

She now has the opportunity to make an impassioned yet statesmanlike address to the nation. She can explain the reasons why she believes so strongly in her deal. She can set out how the only alternatives are now a softer Brexit or no Brexit at all. So strongly does she believe her deal is in the national interest, she can say, that she has sacrificed herself to get it passed. She can say that is what a true patriot and public servant should be prepared to do.

Her promise to go makes it more likely that her deal will pass, of course, but it will also help to define her premiership in a more positive way. She might have stumbled on many occasions, but she took up a difficult task when others declined or were derailed, and she delivered – she hopes to be able to say – a deal that was not perfect but got Britain out of the EU.

And she set up the Conservative Party to move on to the next challenge facing the country. The dedicated public servant to the end, she put her country and her party before her own interests.

Like everything else these days, history is written too quickly, and the immediate accounts and analyses of Mrs May’s premiership will no doubt come flowing out fast.

They will be premature, however, for we do not yet know precisely how her time in Downing Street will end.

It is not the premiership she hoped it would be. She wanted to be a prime minister with a social and economic programme that changed the country. But that was not her fate.

She has fallen on her sword to deliver her deal, and decided to leave No10 on her own terms. But she is, and will remain forever, the Brexit Prime Minister.

read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion