...and none of them has an ounce of Mrs May’s sense of duty

Every Prime Minister needs the fortitude to endure ridicule. After losing the Brexit vote by 230, Theresa May needs it more than most. People are dancing on her political grave, which is understandable, for any occupant of No 10 has to take the blame when the Government is in crisis.

But Mrs May’s fortitude in adversity commands admiration, albeit reluctant in some quarters. So, too, does her determination to find a compromise where none appears possible.

On Tuesday, her Brexit policy was rejected by those who want weaker ties between Britain and europe and by those who want them to be stronger.

The PM may have performed the service of demonstrating to the country not only that her own approach is doomed to failure, but that no one else has yet found a way of delivering Brexit which commands general consent.

I’m sure no one else could have attempted with more dogged persistence to fulfil the referendum result in such a way as to win the agreement of those 52 per cent who voted Leave as well as the agreement of the european trading partners with whom we need to go on doing business after March 29.

Dogged persistence is an unglamorous virtue, and compromise an unglamorous goal. Indeed, part of Mrs May’s trouble is that she does not know how to make anyone’s heart beat faster when she pursues this course.

But she has attempted, with the utmost sincerity, to hold her party and nation together. And who is to say that any other approach would have enjoyed greater success?

It is easy to claim that what is now needed is a more dashing form of leadership. But if Boris Johnson is offered as the most obvious example of a more dashing leader, one finds — I am sorry to say as someone who has known him since 1987 — an invincible repugnance expressed by some Conservative MPs.

‘I’d rather my cat be leader of the Conservative Party,’ one Tory MP told me recently. ‘It’s more trustworthy than Boris.’

I profoundly disagree with such an assessment: in my view, if Mr Johnson were to become Prime Minister, he would do everything he could to win round such doubters by making a success of things.

Certainly, that is something that Mrs May has not achieved.

She realises her style is different. Indeed, when she stood for the Conservative leadership in 2016, she said: “I’m not a showy politician . . . I just get on with the job in front of me.”

And that is exactly what she has been doing with Brexit.

Jeremy Corbyn would do no better. He refused to tell the Commons on Tuesday what Labour’s Brexit policy is, for fear of annoying large numbers of his own supporters.

The simple fact is that Mr Corbyn is a spectator, who wants to watch the Conservatives destroy each other, and profit from the resulting chaos.

When he announced his no confidence motion, he conveyed no sense of being a Prime Minister-in-waiting, which is what someone in his job ought to be.

Meanwhile, Mrs May can’t change her nature.

She is the only child of a clergyman who, himself, was the son of a regimental sergeant major. Both grandmothers worked as maids. Her background is less moneyed than David Cameron’s and is one reason why she can claim a more fellow-feeling with the country’s ‘ just- about-managings’, as she has called them. This, again, is not glamorous. When she made her much-ridiculed remark about running through fields of wheat being the naughtiest thing she did as a child, she was trying to conceal the embarrassing truth — that she was a conscientious, devout, hardworking and considerate child.

THESE qualities she still possesses in abundance. But they are not enough in an age where the public are never satisfied with their prime minister for long.

Consider how hated Margaret Thatcher was in many quarters throughout her premiership, and, indeed, for many years afterwards.

Tony Blair enjoyed an unnaturally long political honeymoon, followed by an unnaturally long period, which continues to this day, in which people cannot bear the sight of him.

The job of prime minister is a bed of nails. That is why Mrs May deserves respect.

When Oscar Wilde visited America in 1882, he saw a sign at a miners’ ball which said: ‘ Please don’t shoot the pianist, he is doing his best.’

Might not something similar be said about Theresa May?

She, too, is doing her best, and the issue of Brexit is so difficult that it is hard to imagine anyone else making a better job of it.

Andrew Gimson’s most recent book is Gimson’s Prime ministers: Brief Lives From walpole To may (square Peg, £10.99).