While incompetent Tory vultures circulate, there’s still room for Theresa May to rise from the ashes once again

William Hague is the closest thing to a competent compromise candidate, but he’s been there and done that, and doesn’t seem to want a second T-shirt

There seems less chance of May lasting until the next Australian Open men’s final than of Eric Pickles winning it in straight sets (Getty)

Beyond the hero worship of Geoffrey Boycott in those wicked girlhood days when she would wantonly run through fields of wheat, little is known of Theresa May’s interest in sport.

Even if tennis leaves her stone cold, I hope she played truant from church this morning to take a morale boost from watching Roger Federer snaffle his 20th grand slam title in Australia.

The Fed was almost universally regarded as past his sell-by date not so long ago – and just look at him now, weeping with joy after snaffling a 20th grand slam title.

There may be a minor distinction between the Swiss and the PM in terms of talent, but the lesson for May is that the unlikeliest recovery is possible if you can only keep faith.

It could be that five years from now, she will be restored to the pinnacle she scaled after becoming Westminster’s number one, before the altitude sickness addled her mind into calling an election.

At this moment, however, there seems less chance of her lasting until the next Australian Open men’s final than of Eric Pickles winning it in straight sets while tethered to a hostess trolley and a gravely arthritic mountain yak.

Having wasted the partial recovery with that slightly cack-handed reshuffle, she finds the vultures hovering in ever-decreasing circles. Small wonder there. The only explanation for any beast failing to kill off a cornered Jeremy Hunt, the gazelle of the Cabinet, is bleeding to death in the dust itself.

The newspapers landing on British doormats while Federer and Marin Cilic were knocking up in Melbourne were uniformly dismal for May. I guess things could always be worse. But in the absence of the Sun on Sunday headline “World Exclusive: Burqa-clad PM’s £5,000 President’s Club Harvey Weinstein Lap Dance!”, it’s not immediately obvious how.

One front page details how three former Tory Cabinet ministers (Peter Lillley and the two Andrews, Mitchell and Lansley) offered up their Brexit inside knowledge – for rather more than £5,000 – to undercover hacks posing as Chinese businessmen. Another features criticism of her Brexit negotiating style from the revered respected geopolitical analyst, Donald J Trump.

Elsewhere are reports of: an ultimatum to May to turn things around by the local elections in May or be ousted; the total paralysis of the Downing Street operation; an unnamed senior minister’s threat to take May out with a “suicide bomber” resignation; a pro-Brexit cabal trying to blackmail her with an “end Philip Hammond or we’ll end you” diktat; and a new flurry of letters to the 1922 Committee chair demanding a leadership election, nudging the total close to the 48 required to activate one.

If that cabal believes a PM too weak to fire Hunt could fire the Chancellor, let alone with the latest poll showing the punters favouring a second referendum by a resounding 16 per cent, they are seriously deranged.

But then derangement is the traditional vacuum filler for a void of real leadership, and the signs of that nowhere clearer than in the betting on May’s successor.

Approaching this definitive fork in the road to the future, both favourites, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson, have slipped through a worm hole from Edwardian England. They were conceived as minor Drone’s Club bread-throwers in the Bertie Wooster Thank You, Jeeves!, before PG Wodehouse cut them for space from the final draft.

Also among that flock of encircling vultures are Andrea Leadsom, whose 2016 leadership campaign suggested she would struggle to beat Cruella De Vil for President of the Kennel Club; David Davis, the engagingly bamboozled Private Godfrey who cannot attend a Brexit negotiation without looking like he needs to be excused; that same Jeremy Hunt, whose knack for surviving three-minute radio interviews is now being wilfully confused with Churchillian gravitas; Michael Gove, who can’t decide from one minute to the next if he’d kill to be Tory leader or die to avoid it; and Gavin Williamson, the new boy in a tearing hurry who last week leaked classified US intelligence about cyber warfare on the same day, by eeriest coincidence, his one-time squiring of a woman other than his wife came to public attention.

William Hague is the closest thing to a competent compromise candidate with a chance of avoiding civil war. But he’s been there and done that, and doesn’t seem to want a second T-shirt in place of the ermine robe.

The only candidates anyone on nodding terms with sanity might identify as credible, Amber Rudd and Ruth Davidson, not only have tricky problems (respectively, that tiny majority in Hastings, and not being at Westminster), they are far too Remainery for the Uber Outers on the back benches, and the national membership formally known as The Nutters In The Country.

And so the tragicomic stasis persists as the countdown clock ticks towards March 2018, with May defying daily predictions that she is one resignation or grandstanding speech from the chop. If she dreams of a Federesque recovery, who would blame her? It is incredibly hard to live without hope. For now, she is cast to type as her idol Geoff Boycott, soporifically occupying the crease for no grander reasons than personal survival and to prevent the other side having a bat.