Now she has finally bowed to the inevitable and announced her resignation, Theresa May will be remembered for three words above all else: nothing has changed.
But in three unimaginably long years, doing an unimaginably impossible job, and making it unimaginably hard for herself, Theresa May has changed, utterly.
Once upon a time, an opinion poll had her as the most popular prime minister of all time.
By her last moments, she had hardened to little more than a scowl.
Here are her defining moments, as witnessed by me.
1. The general election of 2017 was the moment she would vaporise Jeremy Corbyn, and deliver unto herself the huge parliamentary majority she would need to get her Brexit deal through parliament. It did not work out that way.
2. At Tory party conference 2017, months after squandering her parliamentary majority, she needed to give the speech of her life. Instead, she accepted a P45 from a prankster, became unable to speak and then the set fell apart.
3. Forced to return to Brussels for yet another round of begging for changes to the backstop, Theresa May utterly failed to mask her fury in front of the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg.
4. As her Withdrawal Agreement Bill faced death by a thousand amendments, her plan went horribly wrong, and the government tried to defeat itself by losing to itself, and then lost.
5. When her Brexit deal was defeated for a third time, with absolutely nowhere left to turn, she stared down the barrel of the TV cameras in 10 Downing Street and tried to hypnotise the nation. It didn’t work.
And then her time was up.
