All along her frontbench are colleagues just waiting for her to go, so they can take her job and move into her Downing Street home. On her backbenches are MPs who shamelessly boast to journalists their fantasies about putting her in a “noose” and “knifing her in the front”. She is derided, she is hated, she is the target for some of the most outrageous abuse ever to be heaped on a 62-year-old woman from Eastbourne.

In a democracy intent on beating itself up, Theresa May has become the nation’s punchbag. On radio phone-ins, the callers pour bile upon her. On TV sofas, pundits speculate about how many days she has left at No 10. When she isn’t attracting derision, she attracts something arguably worse for a politician: pity. Her voice has gone and, the theory goes, soon she will follow.

But something more profound is going on here. The UK is in the middle of a crisis of governability. This is a country in mutinous mood. The factors driving that are complex: austerity, decades of the deliberate hollowing out of nations and regions, a form of capitalism that has lost much of its sense of responsibility and institutional counterweight. But the result is clear: whoever was governing now – however gifted in thought or word or deed – would find the task close to impossible. It just so happens that May is also especially bad at it.

Britain has spent 40-plus years arrogating more and more power to its centre – and now its centre has no idea of how to wield that power. That I think is the fundamental political and economic crisis we face today. By all means, revile May. But don’t kid yourself that her successor will do any better.