THERESA MAY at last bowed to the inevitable today and handed in her resignation. She finally accepted that she was the biggest obstacle to Britain making any progress towards Brexit, having wasted six weeks of the extension agreed with the EU in late March.

Her time in office will be remembered for its calamitousness. She had one job to do – Brexit – and failed to come close. She lost her majority in a self-inflicted catastrophe of an early election. She slumped to the biggest ever Parliamentary defeats; 36 ministers resigned from her Government in three years, which is more than Tony Blair or Margaret Thatcher lost in ten. And she leaves Britain in a messier state than when she arrived.

This is largely due to her tactics and her lack of a clear vision of where she wanted to take the country – in a world of vacuous political slogans, "Brexit means Brexit" cleans up.

But could anyone else have done much better? Britain is deeply divided against itself. Indeed, the Tory party is so deeply divided that it may soon cease to exist. Fate, and David Cameron, dealt Mrs May a dreadful hand, and for all her political failings, Mrs May played it personally with admirable stoicism and extraordinary resilience. The barrage of criticism, even ridicule, she faced on a daily basis would have destroyed lesser characters.

History will probably judge her more kindly than those of us who have had to live through the weakest government in modern times.