Hello my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. It's been another week in the life of Theresa May's Prime Minister ship but it is very nearly the last week.

And we're going to talk about what might be coming next.

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So I'm really excited that Chris Brook is back. I'm aware that quite a lot of people might have joined listening to this podcast in the long period since Chris was lost on which I think is about a year ago.

Not much has happened as barely anything to talk about since you were last year but we'll try and catch up.

Chris among many other things used to keep us on the straight and narrow about British politics and how it works, particularly electoral politics.

So it may be that some of the ways we've gone wrong in the last year because he hasn't been here. And Helen Thompson is here also.

Theresa May has produced the final version and I think we have to assume it is the final version of her Brexit plan which I think we also have to assume it's going nowhere.

It may not even come to a vote though she seems determined to put it to a vote.

And it really does feel like the last days of this Prime Minister ship it's almost impossible to imagine a scenario where she keeps going for more than a few weeks.

The authority has drained away. We've talked a lot about the sequencing of Brexit and whether she could kind of get people lined up in a way so that their choices were reduced and the unpalatable one pushed them towards her preferred option.

It's almost like she's engineered it so that the reverses happen. So each time she produces a version of her preferred option.

People seem to have more and more reason to share away from it because they think they have other options because she has no authority left.

So one of the questions and there are many about what we've learned from her Prime Minister ship.

Is it about her and her mismanagement of this or has something actually happened in this parliament to the officer Prime Minister to executive authority?

Because, and this is the question I'm really interested in, is her successor going to have any better prospect of corralling this parliament through the authority of the executive to do what he or she is probably going to be or what he or she wants?

I think the answer to that question ultimately is no. They're going to be stuck with largely the same difficulties that Theresa May has had.

I think some caveats need to be put on that though. The first is that this last stage, the point from the defeat of the third meaningful vote to where we are now, is quite difficult to understand what she thought she was trying to do.

I think all the other stages get into that point. There were reasons for what she did that were discernible.

There were also reasons why you might have thought that it wasn't such a sensible strategy to pursue, but at least it was kind of like reasoning counter-reason.

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