With Theresa May’s Brexit hopes looking forlorn and her position increasingly beleaguered our political correspondent reflects that few prime ministers have left Downing Street at a time of their own choosing

In last year’s Christmas issue I shared some anecdotes of events that convulsed life in Downing Street while many of the rest of us were pulling crackers and eating turkey. It was serious and gloomy stuff: Suez and strikes; bleak midwinters of discontent; electricity blackouts; and troubles at the Treasury. Yet twelve months later and none of the crises that beset the prime ministers in recent Chistmases past seem comparable to the miserable situation Theresa May is in today, nor do any of the political problems of yesteryear seem quite as intractable, quite as incapable of any kind of sensible resolution, as the present state of stasis in our national affairs.

By the time you read this it is entirely possible – indeed entirely likely – that all sorts of things may have changed. What I think will not have altered, however, is our inability to see a way forward through the murk, and the folly of making any firm predictions about what will happen next. I have just told a researcher for a radio programme on which I regularly appear that I have no idea what I will say tomorrow morning. Who knows what the morning will bring? Still less do any of us know what next week might bring, let alone next year.

It is probable, nevertheless, given the outcome of the Conservatives’ recent vote of (limited) confidence in Mrs May as their leader that she will remain as prime minister for a few weeks yet. We know also that she will not fight the next general election as leader of her party because she has said as much.