Twisted, sadistic revenge ... or just May at her tedious worst?

If you wanted to be generous, you would tell yourself that Theresa May did it on purpose. That it was a cunning plot, hatched over a nightcap in No10, to hoots of glee from her husband. After all the horrid things the newspapers had written about her, this would be her revenge.

Step one: announce, out of the blue, that she was going to make a major speech, the very last of her premiership. Step two: refuse to disclose any of its contents in advance, thus raising hopes among journalists that Mrs May was planning to say

something surprising, revealing, personal, newsworthy.

And then finally, step three: subject the entire press corps to the most punishingly tedious half-hour of their professional lives. Deliver a speech that was scrupulously news-free. Leave them to trudge back to their desks empty-handed, their afternoon wasted. And then, once they’d gone, cackle in triumph at having put one over on those hateful hacks.

That, as I say, is the generous way to interpret what Mrs May did yesterday. The alternative is less kind. Namely: that it wasn’t deliberate at all. She’s just very, very boring.

Either way, there can be no disagreement about the speech’s contents. Even by Mrs May’s standards, it was spectacularly dull. Thunderingly banal. Blisteringly bland.

She introduced it as her “personal reflections” on “the state of politics”, but it featured not an ounce of insight, wit or analysis.

Instead, all we got was a trundling conveyor belt of torpid platitudes. Prejudice is bad. Teamwork is good. Some people on the internet are rude. The financial crisis left lots of people worse off, and populists took advantage. Many things are better than they were in the distant past, but there are other things that could improve. This, apparently, is what she’s learnt, in three years as the most powerful person in Britain.

One thing she hasn’t learnt, however, is self-awareness, because she seemed utterly oblivious to her own double standards. A Prime Minister defined by her stubbornness, piously preaching the virtues of “compromise”.

A Prime Minister who blithely insisted again and again that “No deal is better than a bad deal”, sternly warning the rest of us that “Words have consequences”. A Prime Minister who here confessed that she was “worried about the state of politics”, yet spent precisely none of her speech reflecting on the part she herself had played in bringing this state about.

Her refusal to give a straight answer was, as ever, near-heroic. “It used to be asked of applicants at Conservative candidate selection meetings, ‘Are you a conviction politician, or are you a pragmatist?’” she sniffed. “I have never accepted the distinction.”

Classic May. Never ask her if she wants tea or coffee. She’ll tell you she wants both, in the same cup. In her time in office, Mrs May has treated us to any number of dreary speeches. But she really did save the worst till last.