Theresa May was simply never in the same league as Lady Thatcher

It was hard to love Theresa May before she was PM, however much one admired her fashion choices or her commitment to classical music – I once saw her in a box at the Proms with husband Philip; she is, to her credit, an avid fan of Schubert, Purcell and Elgar. But when she became Prime Minister in 2016, many were still cheered to have the second woman in the top job in politics.

If Mrs May lacked obvious similarities – ideological, intellectual, circumstantial – with Lady T, the fact of her gender meant we were willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Moreover, we noted, both lady PMS faced delivering the country from some of the most intractable problems it had ever faced. Within five years, Thatcher had won a war and transformed Britain, curbing strike culture and the tyranny of industry.

We sat back and waited to see how Mrs May would handle the riddle of “delivering” Brexit. Well, we all know how that’s turned out – and how it must rankle with Mrs May, whose desire to outdo Lady T goes back decades. Desperate to be the first female PM, she was famously infuriated when Thatcher got there first. She then turned to emulation, wearing a blue suit on the day she was first elected in 1997 that perfectly matched the one Lady T wore when she entered Downing Street in 1979.

The attempted parallels have continued. Under attack from her party in 1990, Thatcher vowed to “fight on, and fight to win” – just as Mrs May has been doing for months. Like the Iron Lady, Mrs May too eventually offered herself up of her own accord – in the same room Thatcher did.

Yet however much we wished it, and Mrs May clearly wished it, it was clear almost from the outset that she could never be in the same league as Lady Thatcher. Where Thatcher went from ever-memorable one-liners (negotiating with Jacques Delors on Europe’s demands: “No, no, no!”) to substantial, sharp-eyed arguments, Mrs May’s speeches are famed for their emptiness.

Whatever one thinks of Brexit, it should have been treated with an ideological and historical seriousness that has been sorely absent in the PM’S rhetoric.

Many have made the rueful comparison with the sophistication of Lady Thatcher’s Bruges Speech in 1988 on the future of Europe. Even Thatcher’s reversal on Europe, which she had come to violently distrust, was meaty; meaty enough to bring about her downfall.

Dogmatism and determination are May’s chief calling cards. But while such single-mindedness might have been handy for managing Home Office targets, at 10 Downing Street it came across as thick-headedness, inflexibility and a fatal lack of political vision.

Brexit would always have been a mess to “deliver”, but there’s little doubt Lady Thatcher would have made far more of it than the bloody stalemate it’s been under the present leader. So much for sisterhood.