In what might have been an unremittingly bleak account of British public failures, she finds heroes – more often heroines – to admire, from the campaigning Hillsborough families to the medical expert Dr Isabel Gal, who spotted the dangers of Primodos and was persecuted for it; or the youth worker Jayne Senior and the South Yorkshire Police analyst Angie Heal, who tried desperately hard to blow the whistle on the Rotherham child abuse cases, and were threatened for their pains. There were many other topics of great interest that opened a listeners eyes. It was also read very well by Theresa May. I enjoyed much of this, but I still can't get over the Brexit part of here book. It is something that left me dumfounded. But then, let's be honest, it was never going to be easy for anyone. I can't help feeling she lost sight of the binary vote having one lot of winners and one lot of losers. It's as though she wanted to give everyone nothing. Nothing, except compromise. (I'm not going to make you vote again, but you can't really have what you voted for) So we should compromise. There can be no winners. Only losers, on each side. Who had responsibility for the standards and the ethos of the Home Office for half a dozen years? Who presided over a culture of institutional ignorance and arrogance towards the Windrush generation? Who was the home secretary when the department received warnings that many of them were being wrongly treated as illegal immigrants? Who had failed to foresee and avoid a scandal that the inquiry into it concluded was “foreseeable and avoidable”?

Exhibit A is John Bercow, the former Commons Speaker, whose shenanigans she blames for the collapse of her Brexit deal. “Not just a bully but also a serial liar,” she says: yet this bully was in charge of the parliamentary system. This brings her on to her wider theme: corruption within these systems, and what happens when those in charge care about themselves, not others – leaving the powerless without a voice.

Mrs May said: “Time and time again, during my period in government, I saw public institutions abusing their power by seeking to defend themselves in the face of challenge rather than seek the truth. Now, I understand that the former PM did not wish to write a traditional memoir- I truly understand that. Despite that, I think she does herself and the public a disservice by not having this book be that. Theresa May has attempted to write a book detailing (detailing is a generous word- merely mentioning is more appropriate) various different scandals and events from her premiership in a way that is least controversial and damaging to her and instead feigns an interest in presenting these as wider abuses of power. By presenting these events as part of a wider theme, she simultaneously attempts to remove any real blame that she, her government and her party share whilst also forcing references to her valiant efforts to deal with said abuses of power… She is 100% attempting to have her cake and eat it whilst making it impossible to really scrutinise her work.

Dismissive about Labour – she’s a proper Tory – May is prepared to be sharp about her own side, too. Looking at the wider picture after Grenfell, she complains that too many Conservatives came to see social housing as a matter of problem families and problem individuals, refusing to hear what they were saying. She thinks that, in Laurie Magnus, Rishi Sunak has appointed an ethics adviser without sufficient experience. And after a withering account of modern slavery in Britain she says of the current Prime Minister: “To my dismay, the government’s approach… has been driven by the desire to deal with illegal immigration rather than by the wish to stop slavery.”

Our democracy depends on people having trust in their public institutions and politicians.” 'Unflinching account' The book’s synopsis mentions little about May’s time in No 10 and nothing about the battles of the Brexit years. It says May will discuss how “the powerful repeatedly chose to use their power not in the interests of the powerless but to serve themselves or to protect the organisation to which they belonged”. A valiant trawl through the new prime minister’s record… Prince’s narrative energy never flags.’ Rafael Behr, The Guardian There are those who maintain that the EU commission ought to have offered more concessions. One of Barwell’s interesting observations is that the commission “far from taking the most hardline position… was the closest thing we had to a friend, particularly towards the end of the negotiations”. The toughest lines were taken by the leaders of the member states. Contrary to the widespread and completely wrong perception that they would “come to our rescue”, it was Emmanuel Macron and his counterparts who repeatedly intervened to harden up the EU’s position. Their understandable priority was to protect the integrity of the EU and safeguard themselves from Eurosceptic parties in their own countries. At one summit, Merkel’s first question to May is: “What’s the price?” In other words, in what ways would the UK be worse off for leaving as a deterrent to anyone else doing the same.

Had Bercow not done this, “there was every prospect that we would have delivered an earlier exit from the EU, maintained better relations with our European partners and, above all, delivered an agreement which would have been more beneficial for Northern Ireland and hence for the future integrity of the UK than the one Boris Johnson signed.” The Abuse of Power is a promising title for Theresa May’s book. There is much she could say on the theme: how she ran government as a triumvirate with two unelected special advisers, keeping her Cabinet colleagues in the dark about things such as the 2017 election and even the Tory manifesto. But those hunting for references to such dramatic moments will be disappointed: May’s book is not, really, about her. It’s a reflection on the failings of others and what led them to make the mistakes they did. Her election disaster was critical to what followed. It made the parliamentary arithmetic fiendish, sapped her authority over both cabinet and party while diminishing her credibility with the EU. European leaders became increasingly sceptical about whether she would be able to get any kind of Brexit deal through parliament and that reduced their appetite for compromise. Ambitious members of the cabinet, not least Boris Johnson, had more incentive to position themselves to supplant her than help sell an agreement to the Tory party and the public. That further weakened her hand in Brussels. Michel Barnier, the EU’s point man in the negotiations, spelled it out to May’s face: “We trust you, Theresa, but we are not sure how long you will be prime minister and we don’t trust what we think is coming next.” Those misgivings would turn out to be very well placed. Again, I refused. I resisted both of these proposals, not just because of the implications for the role of parliament, but mainly because of my firm belief that it would have been unthinkable to bring the monarch into these matters. By sanctioning the idea of prorogation, the hard-line Brexiteers were taking a sledgehammer to the British constitution.”

The former premier said the volume would investigate how public institutions “abuse their power rather than seek the truth”. A very different character, a man that May thought “morally unfit” to be prime minister, is now hoping to succeed where she failed. I look forward to Johnson at 10, though it is impossible at this moment to know whether that will be another big book or a very short one.