Is Theresa May the bottom of the U-bend?

We are sick of repeating our Dim Theresa thesis: she is an extremely dim authoritarian – in her dim brain there is no room for subtle analysis or self-questioning. The thesis is confirmed on a daily basis.

Throughout her premiership (and in every other ministerial position she has ever occupied) shambles follow cock-ups; disasters follow shambles.

If only she had the knack of choosing good advisors, but even that minimal ability is not part of her tiny skillset. It's worse, in fact: she chooses the worst possible advisors she can find. Allowing her to put herself in charge of Brexit was a particularly malign move by the gods.

Every day more evidence of her incomprehension and incompetence arrives, yet her position is unassailable: Jeremy Corbyn and his troupe of Marxist bogeypersons are waiting and watching. Après moi, le déluge! Her party consists of rabbits transfixed in the headlights of the approaching mad, cryptocommunist doom, their stipends at risk. Their once great blonde hope is now stained as a fornicator, a cheat and a lying buffoon. There is nothing that the party rabbits can or will do.

Mismanaging decline

Harold Macmillan was the last great prime minister of Britain; certainly the last one with strategic vision. His vision of the 'winds of change' blowing across the continent of Africa went into the quotation books, but his vision of the task of British government as being the management of decline was more important.

Following the economic wreck of the Second World War, the mad spending and social engineering of the postwar socialist government, the waste of time that was the geriatric Churchill and the ineffectual Anthony Eden, Macmillan was dealt a bad hand, which he played as best he could despite his treacherous and decadent colleagues. He was mocked for his seeming defeatism, but he was right – absolutely, spot on right, in fact.

At the end of his period of office (1963) a Swiss person (you know, the ones with the stable currency) would have had to put twelve francs and a little bit of change on the bank counter to buy a pound note. When Macmillan entered office in 1956 the five pound note was a piece of white paper not much smaller than a modern A5 sheet in size covered with elegant copperplate script.

Today, a Swiss person could get one of the grubby lumps of scrap metal that shred pockets and purses that are denominated as pounds sterling for one franc and a small coin or two. A coffee at Zurich main railway station will today require the equivalent of fifty grams of metal in British money.

The buying power of the pound is now about six percent of what it was then – repeat after me slowly: six percent.

Having to remember all this is the punishment nightmare for those Britons who have lived too long. We thought nothing could be worse than Heath, Wilson or Home, then the gods brought Callaghan – the 'Winter of Discontent' – and Thatcher to gnaw at our livers. Mrs Thatcher famously beat the unions but mass manufacturing in Britain died out with or without them. She also famously whupped the Argies, just don't ask where those men and ships and aircraft are now.

John Major couldn't be worse, could he? Yes, indeed he could and indeed he was – and by some margin at that. And just to punish us for our presumption in ever hoping for better, the Lords of the Earth sent us Blair and Brown during those long years of 'New Labour' hegemony.

How sensible Britons have wailed for fifty years: Spare us, O Heavens, we beseech thee! Incline thine ear! Wails that went unheard by the pitiless ones, sipping ambrosia.

Just to punish us for our presumption of their aid, they gave us Cameron and Clegg, then Cameron and his inner Clegg, then May. Whither shall we flee? We are caught in the middle of a perfect storm of curses that unites the Oresteia with the Book of Job, the Erinyes and the festering boils, brought together in the figure of Theresa May.

I exaggerate? Just you wait – the United Kingdom is slithering down a long tube and is still nowhere near the bottom. And keep your eye on the Swiss franc, the measure of all things.