Janet DALEY

Every conversation I have had with political friends in recent months (and I do mean every single conversation) has been reduced to amateur psychoanalysis of Theresa May. Why? How? What strange configuration of personal experience/ temperamental peculiarity/ psychological aberration could possibly account for this bizarre capacity for obtuseness/deceitfulness/ purblind insensitivity, blah-blah-blah?

You know all this. I expect you’ve been engaged in the same sort of speculation yourself. Is she incorrigibly arrogant, or maniacally committed to the righteousness of her own mission, or just absurdly unable to understand the arguments against her?

Well compellingly fascinating as all this may be, it is nearly over, whatever Mrs May might think. Very soon, no more time will need to be wasted on her deeply puzzling personality.

The Cabinet and the 1922 Committee between them will at last do what needs to be done. We may never know why Mrs May failed to realise how outrageous her behaviour was – even when she was betraying her Cabinet colleagues for that last extraordinary time by producing a Withdrawal Agreement Bill that was drastically different from what they believed they had agreed. What matters now is that the party – in the form of its most senior members – must dissociate itself and somehow begin the process of reconstructing its credibility.

There is a tragic dimension to this, not just for Mrs May herself (most of us are too furious to care much about that now) but for the party and the country. Had she done the rational thing and resigned after the second failed attempt to pass her Withdrawal Agreement, the whole story might have been quite different. To

have brought that agreement back for a second try would not, after all, have seemed unreasonable. (But to bring it back for a third and – good grief – a fourth time looks insane.)

And had she accompanied her exit from No10 with a gracious, dignified valedictory speech – “I have tried my best to deliver what the country wanted, etc etc” – then the rehabilitation of her reputation might have begun immediately.

If, by any chance, the party had dissolved into fratricide and irreconcilable division after her voluntary departure (which is quite clearly what she expects will happen in her wake), then by now, indeed, she might have been seen as a lost leader of some distinction.

But no. She clings to the job which she inexplicably claims to love – although we still really don’t understand why. Is it pure, cynical egotism? Or an unquestioning belief that she is the only grown-up in the room? Whoops sorry, I’m doing psychoanalysis again. She is unknowable and probably will be to historical observers as well.

All that matters is what happens next. Above all, when she does go, the Conservative Party must not prove her prediction right by blowing itself apart irreconcilably. This time it must take its responsibilities to the country so seriously that no one will be in doubt about the integrity of our politics. Because this is very grave now. It goes way beyond our relationship with the EU.

Whoever walks into Downing Street next is going to have to make the speech of a lifetime and follow it up with a quality of leadership that will be remembered for generations.