There is only one person who can save us from May’s disaster... and you’re looking straight at her

ON WEDNESDAY, I was talking to a Minister who used to be in the Army. ‘You know what you do when everything’s falling apart around you,’ he explained. ‘When the plan’s gone to pot and you don’t know where the hell you are and your men are starting to panic? You dig in.’

The Government is falling apart. Or it would be if we had a Government. The DUP are still stubbornly refusing to turn on the political life-support machine. The Queen’s Speech has become The Back Of The Queen’s Fag Packet. Tory MPs bear t he countenance of Michael Caine witnessing the Zulus’ arrival on the Oscarberg Terrace.

Those MPs need to stop panicking, and start digging in. More specifically, they need to recognise this is not the moment to lose their heads, nor is it the moment to demand Theresa May loses hers. When the Prime Minister admitted to her backbenchers ‘I got us into this mess, I’ll get us out’, she earned the right to do just that.

In the immediate aftermath of the Election result, I found it inconceivable she could survive the year. But bizarrely, over the past week it has become apparent the person best placed to extricate the nation from the crisis Theresa May has created is Theresa May herself.

Westminster is again echoing to the sound of steel rasping against stone as potential successors and their courtiers sharpen their blades. But any strike now would be catastrophically premature.

For a start, none of those successors is remotely prepared to take over the reins of a fracturing nation. David Davis is already deep up- country in the Brexit jungle and has told Mrs May to her face that she has his loyalty.

BORIS JOHNSON spent the week calling backbench MPs to insist any manoeuvring i s being done without his consent and nursing the bruises of Wednesday’s bicyclecrash interview on the Government’s legislative programme.

Philip Hammond’s bold Mansion House repudiation of Brexit means he is now a marked man among Tory Eurosceptics, and Amber Rudd is putting in 18-hour shifts managing the terror threat and Grenfell emergency response. Not only i s there no vacancy, for now there are no properly prepped applicants.

Then there is Mrs May herself. I described her as an ‘interim Prime Minister’ long before the voters made the term fashionable, and wrote before polling day that the 2017 Election would be her last. But the anti- May narrative has now run out of control.

The campaign t rail brutally exposed her weaknesses but she still has strengths and they are calibrated to the moment. She is a Brexit pragmatist. Her reluctance to publicly emote masks a strong moral core. She retains a strong grasp of policy detail – ‘She’d be a perfect Permanent Secretary,’ a colleague told me last week.

And though the events of the past fortnight have hammered her self-confidence, they have yet to break her.

Mrs May will never fully reverse her political fortunes but if she leans on those strengths, she can still stabilise them. As long as they are combined with the selfawareness to understand precisely how she guided her Government to its current dire pass.

One thing she must reflect on is that on her watch, Downing Street became a lunatic asylum. Over recent days, I have spoken to several No 10 offi ci al s. Their stories read like something from the script of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. ‘She was just a creation of Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, [May’s former joint chiefs of staff],’ one told me. ‘She was the puppet and they were the puppet masters. She just looked at them for help in what to say.’ Another said: ‘They used to treat her like she was in a care home.’

A third recounted how ‘Nick used to sit in meetings and say, “What can we brief out that will annoy Hammond?” That’s the Downing Street chief of staff talking. It was mad’.

To date, Mrs May’s premiership has been dominated by fear. Of events. Of losing control. Of everyone and anything outside her insanely insular inner circle.

But paradoxically, she no longer has anything to be afraid of. The gods cannot mock her any more mercilessly than they did on June 8. Her inner circle has fractured. The nation has passed its judgment on her, and will not be asked to do so again.

Some in her party are demanding a new Theresa May. But what is needed now is the old Theresa May. The Theresa May who was a sceptical Remainer. Who had the courage to stand in front of the Police Federation and tell them: ‘It is not enough to mouth platitudes about a few bad apples.’ Who managed to negotiate a legal and diplomatic minefield and successfully deport hate preacher Abu Qatada.

SO MRS May must dig in and her MPs must dig in around her. And if some are reluctant to pick up a shovel, they should consider this.

A change of leadership represents the Tory Party’s last throw of the dice. If they move at the wrong time, or for the wrong person, or in the wrong direction, that will be it.

They will have opened the door of Downing Street t o Jeremy Corbyn, and there will be nobody left to bar the way.

For now, there is only one person who can save the country and the Conservative Party from the disastrous Theresa May premiership. Her name is Theresa May.

ARTS Minister Matt Hancock was walking round the Commons on Tuesday, proudly displaying a copy of The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album, sent to him by his old Despatch Box sparring partner Michael Dugher. The former Labour Shadow Culture Secretary has just been appointed chief executive of industry body UK Music. Come together, guys.