Star comment: May must win back reputation

Mmm... another 50 MPs would be nice. Or some great personal victory to enhance her reputation and secure her place in Number 10.

But we are where we are, and she is where she is.

There are Prime Ministers whose standings take a dive through bad luck, events over which they have no control. Gordon Brown did not call a general election in the better times and then found himself tossed about by the storms of a global financial meltdown. He was powerless, which is not far off looking hopeless when you are Prime Minister.

Yet in her months of office Mrs May had no such events bringing her down. She managed to do it all by herself. It was a choice, the consequence of her own misjudgment.

Had she not needlessly called the general election, which actually involved having to have a special vote in the House of Commons to depart from the five-year rule on general elections, her position today would have been strong, both within her party and in the wider political sense.

She would have had an overall majority. Labour MPs would have continued to despair about Jeremy Corbyn, a leader they viewed as virtually certain to bring electoral disaster to the party. How dearly they wished to get rid of him.

What she and her advisers failed to appreciate is that a general election is not just about the vote, but about the campaign, and here the veteran campaigner Jeremy Corbyn knocked spots off her. He was able to engage and enthuse elements of the electorate in a way her approach, more haughty and distant, failed to do.

All this is water under the bridge. What Mrs May needs now is to be shown in a good light. This may not necessarily come through anything agreeable for the country. Mrs Thatcher, with whom Mrs May was compared, was assailed by economic troubles in the early 1980s. Then the Falklands War came along and her standing was transformed.

The Brexit negotiations will never be Mrs May's Falklands, because there are so many juries sitting in judgment.

However, Shropshire's Tory MPs are all offering their backing. And dearly as Mr Corbyn would love a vote of no confidence which precipitates another general election, voters may not be so keen.

It took one misjudgment to land Mrs May in her self-dug hole. It is going to take time and a lot of work to dig herself out.