Have the chickens come home to roost for this absurdly stubborn PM?

And so, the long-awaited, long-postponed, moment of reckoning is finally at hand. Like Iain Duncan Smith in 2003, Theresa May faces a vote of no confidence in her leadership of the Conservative Party. This time rather more is at stake: if she loses the vote (as her ill-starred predecessor did 15 years ago) she will also be expelled from Number 10.

In her statement today in Downing Street, May presented the vote and the prospect of a leadership contest if she loses as a fatal distraction from the Brexit process and a gift to Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn. She had, she said, “devoted myself unsparingly” to the responsibilities of her role and had no intention of yielding now.

The announcement by Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee, that the threshold of 48 MPs’ names had finally been passed (after several false starts) and that a vote would now go ahead has naturally triggered speculation about what happens if she loses and who is her most likely successor.

But let us take advantage of this moment of electrified stillness to ask a different question. Namely, why is she still in post at all?

As the Prime Minister’s circumstances have slid from the merely disastrous to the utterly calamitous, it has become commonplace, not to say clichéd, to express admiration for her flinty resolve. We are routinely invited — notwithstanding the fact that her Government is zombified, her party disintegrating and the country heading towards a constitutional and commercial cliff-edge — to salute her determination, her grit, her capacity to soar above the chaos with Zen serenity.

In truth, there has been nothing admirable about May’s conduct. What her cheerleaders hail as tenacity and public-spirited doggedness is something quite different and very far from laudable.

Though she triggers a form of bogus nostalgia for old-fashioned British backbone, the PM actually incarnates an ultra-modern indifference to convention and an imperviousness to the normal pressures of embarrassment. As one of her senior colleagues told me recently, “She just doesn’t obey Marquess of Queensberry rules.”

This is absolutely right. After a profoundly humiliating snap general election, in which she contrived to squander her party’s Commons majority, she emerged from the rubble, dusted herself down and carried on as if nothing much had happened.

As minister after minister has resigned — notably in protest at the Brexit negotiations — she has made a virtue of her public indifference, eschewing reflection let alone humility. This week, she postponed a historic Commons vote on Britain’s future relationship with the EU in the manner of someone mildly irritated at having to rearrange a dinner party.

Her champions (and there are still a few out there) celebrate this as Thatcheresque fortitude. But they are mistaken. They see an awe-inspiring Sphinx but what really stands at the Despatch Box is an immobilised speak-your-weight machine.

Consider any other prime minister of the past 40 years. David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, John Major, Thatcher herself …. any of these would have been long gone by now, driven from office by a sense of honour, obsolescence, powerlessness, or all three. May only looks buttoned-up and politically strait-laced. In fact, she is a quiet anarchist, utterly unconstrained by the normal behavioural codes of office. It has taken the last resort of an internal party confidence vote to put her in a dock of accountability (albeit a dock in which she faces only a tribal jury of Conservative MPs).

In Downing Street today, May said “the Conservatives must not be a single-issue party”. This was rich coming from a single-issue PM. Since 2016, her premiership has been absolutely defined by one objective: the delivery of Brexit. All prime ministers have priorities, some of which they nurture before taking office, while others are forced upon them by the cruel hand of fate.

In May’s case, however, the arrangement of Britain’s departure from the EU has been elevated from priority to raison d’être. Like the original Terminator hunting down Sarah Connor, she has had only goal.

It is in this spirit, and this spirit alone, that she has approached the highest office in the land. Everything has been subordinated to the single task of implementing the 2016 referendum result on March 29. In pursuit of this increasingly intractable project, she has ignored every signal sent by the political marketplace, every collective judgment, every hint dropped by history that her time is up and she should really call an Uber.

Even as the letters of no confidence accumulated in Sir Graham’s inbox, she ignored the ignominy, playing it long as Tory MPs have squabbled over the viability of her successor — whoever he or she is — doing any better. She has been more than willing to play chicken with MPs over her unsellable deal, daring them to resist her until January 21 (little more than two months from the date of Brexit itself).

She fears a People’s Vote — or “no Brexit”, as she calls it — above all else. As evidence mounts daily of the true character of a no-deal exit — of the deplorable, avoidable mutilation of national life that such an outcome would represent — you might think that her judgment has been skewed. But that is scarcely the point.

In her statement today, May referred to the excellent speech she gave on her arrival in Downing Street two and a half years ago that referred to the “burning injustices” faced by so many Britons. But she has conspicuously ignored that challenge in the intervening months, focusing to the exclusion of all else upon a deal which pleases nobody —even, in moments of private candour, herself.

For that fixation, and the wilful narrowness of vision it spawned, she must now face the consequences.