CAN Theresa May survive this grim threat to her own future and that of the Tory Party?

She could be out on her neck sooner rather than later, with Jeremy Corbyn waiting in the wings, ready to pounce.

It is not exactly hero to zero, but Theresa May’s authority has been seriously depleted, not simply by her catastrophic decision to hold a snap general election, but also what was considered an inadequate, even cold, response to the Grenfell Tower disaster.

Now even her future as Prime Minister is seriously under question after barely a year at 10 Downing Street.

The Tories have only themselves to blame. They grotesquely underestimated Jeremy Corbyn’s political acumen and followed slavishly the naive and frankly useless advice from outside “experts” on how to run the election campaign, instead of relying on their own instincts.

Corbyn successfully tapped into the youth vote - something no British political leader has done before - and now he is to appear at the Glastonbury Festival, another feather in his cap. Things could hardly look bleaker for the Tories.

The truth is, the Tories seemingly did all the wrong things after Grenfell, while Corbyn, seen hugging survivors, did all the right ones. It seems cruel, even obscene to equate Grenfell with political point-scoring, but Corbyn was easily the winner.

Now, to add to May’s woes, there is already talk of a leadership contest being considered by her fuming Tory critics, which could see her flat on her face with the ludicrous Boris Johnson in charge.

LET us park Theresa May in a layby for a while. She once described the Tories as the Nasty Party. But for the Really Nasty Party, I would instantly plump for the Liberal Democrats, whose leader Tim Farron was virtually hounded out of the job by colleagues because of his Christian principles on abortion and homosexuality.

I wish he would have stood up to these bullies, but he felt he could not lead the party in these circumstances. It must have been all the more galling for him to be attacked by David Laws, of all people, who was sacked from the Cabinet after 17 days for a breach of the expenses rule.

If these critics think they have won a great victory, they are wrong. They have shown themselves to be totally unworthy of the claim to be liberal - with either a capital, or a small, L.

I was accompanying Helmut Kohl, the portly former German Chancellor who has just died, when he was walking through a German provincial town with Margaret Thatcher.

After about half an hour, he decided he had had more than his fill of being harangued. So after a whispered conversation with an aide, he said to the British PM, “I am so sorry, but I have to return to Bonn at once to attend to an urgent matter.”

And he sped off in a car. A little later, Thatcher peered through the window of a cake shop and saw Kohl tucking into a pile of cream cakes when he should have been on his way to Bonn. Not his finest hour.