It is difficult to judge a premiership even when the incumbent is in her final days. There are so many moving parts. Circumstances vary widely. Most fit Enoch Powell’s famous dictum that: “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.”

Theresa May’s premiership will end in failure, slain by that most ruthless and cruel assassin of British political careers – the European Question. It has blighted her three-year tenure from beginning to end and will sear her long-term reputation for all the dignity with which she has conducted herself in the twilight of her time in office.

Her very real qualities of diligence, of, as she put it when she succeeded David Cameron in 2016, getting on with the work that was put in front of her (the mark of the conscientious grammar school girl of her youthful formation) were almost as naught in coping with the whirlwind of Brexit.

Watching Mrs May’s Number 10 and Whitehall, I kept being reminded of the distinction Walter Bagehot drew in his classic 1867 study of The English Constitution, where he wrote of “the sudden occurrence of a grave tempest” which requires the replacement of the “pilot of the calm by the pilot of the storm”.