Shamefully deluded to the last, the woman who brought us the Hostile Environment for immigrants, left quoting Nicholas Winton.
The woman of Go Home vans, who left children sleeping on the streets of France, self-pityingly quoted the hero who rescued refugee children.
But that was Prime Minister Theresa May all over.
She arrived as a vision of change, standing on the steps of Downing Street and promising to avenge the “burning injustices” that had led a country to Brexit.
She left having not just failed to solve Brexit but even to begin to address its causes.
Those burning injustices just kept on burning, because her own feet were held so close to the flame. Every water cannon she had in her command was turned on her own party.
Maggie May turned out to be that worst combination of politicians. With the stubbornness of Thatcher and the tactical incompetence of Theresa.
Her premiership may have been more pig-headed ineptitude than stubborn spite, but the consequences for ordinary voters were exactly the same.
A generation of children’s lives have been made poorer on her watch.
Even then, it was possible to feel sorry for her on many occasions, surrounded by bastards on every front. Paralysed by the impossibilities of Brexit.
Despised by the Victorian frockcoats of the 1922 committee. Suffering the minute-by-minute political death of a thousand cuts.
Should there ever be a statue for her, it should be of that dead-eyed expression with she surveyed her own green benches as they mocked and maligned her. But there won’t be.
There will be a worse Prime Minister next. Which as a political epitaph for Maggie May is about as pleasant as it gets.
