The challenge that will test her every skill

THERESA MAY has called a General Election during one of the great defining periods in Britain’s history.

As yesterday’s special European Union summit made clear, this country’s divorce from Brussels is likely to be painful. EU leaders want to make an example of Britain – pour encourager les autres – and will spin any agreement as a ‘surrender’ to their demands.

So it is a time when Britain needs a strong, clear-headed and resolute Prime Minister. By those measures, our interview today with Mrs May is hugely reassuring. She comes across as a leader brimming with confidence, a career politician who has found a powerful extra gear in her seventh decade.

She also demonstrates a welcome new open-mindedness towards the 48 per cent of the population who – like The Mail on Sunday – believed that the country’s interests would have been best served by remaining in the EU.

That battle has been fought and decided and Mrs May seems to now understand that ‘the 48’ requires reassurance about the post-EU future – and in particular what a ‘no deal Brexit’ would actually look like.

The General Election marks the moment when the country can draw a line under the toxic exchanges of last summer and move into a new future.

Mrs May’s task is to unify Britain behind her negotiations, which will demand every ounce of the guile she deployed to become Prime Minister – when she fudged her beliefs on Brexit so successfully that everyone thought she was on their side.

She is also a ‘lucky general’ because she is facing a Labour leader in Jeremy Corbyn who is so inept that his MPs are wondering if there is yet time to ditch him before the party crashes to a spectacular Election defeat.

Mrs May spoke to this newspaper under the gaze of Churchill in a portrait. The huge challenges he surmounted will be on the minds of voters on June 8, just two days after the country commemorates the 73rd anniversary of D-Day.

But as Churchill discovered in the 1945 General Election, when the electorate swung behind his socially reforming Labour opponents, even the greatest Prime Ministers neglect the domestic agenda at their peril.

Some of the policy signals coming from No10 are encouraging. If Mrs May achieves her goal of protecting ordinary families from the cold economic winds of globalisation, as she has promised, then she really will render Labour redundant.

Allied to her revival of grammar schools, she seems intent on addressing grumblings within her party that she lacks a coherent vision or a compelling political credo.

Our interview also touches on Mrs May’s down-to-earth side – so effective in garnering support from all social classes and walks of life – talking about her love of Humphrey Bogart in the film classic Casablanca. Bogart’s character, Rick, says at one point: ‘I’ve got a job to do.’

So has Mrs May – and we have confidence that she is the right woman for that job.