Theresa May has announced she is leaving the political stage at the next election while polls indicate that the party she headed for three years faces wipeout after 14 years in office despite last week’s budget tricks.

She was one of five Tory leaders, each disastrous in different ways, who will keep historians busy for decades as they debate where to place them in the list of worst British prime ministers. So it seems an opportune time to offer my league table of the quintet who led the country during the Conservative Civil Wars, which left both the nation and party so badly wounded.

May’s reputation is defined by her failure to break the parliamentary deadlock over Brexit. Yet for all her faults, she tried to find a unifying path through the festering swamp of post-referendum politics, despite her meaningless mantra of “Brexit means Brexit”. She almost succeeded in securing a deal that would have retained access to the EU customs union before seeing her efforts – and then her premiership – ripped apart by the selfish hard-right.

Amid the divisions inflamed by a foolish referendum and the determination of both Brexiteers and Remainers to destroy any deal, she faced an uphill struggle. And the characteristics that ensured survival for six years in the home office and propelled the vicar’s daughter to the top job ended up intensifying her struggles in Downing Street with her defensiveness, inscrutability, mistrust and failure to........

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