IT is customary on the occasion of the departure of the Prime Minister from office for unctuous tributes to be paid to the exiteer, and yesterday was no different, when Theresa May returned to the backbenches.

Perhaps if she had been more of a Brexiteer she would not have had to quit, and the most vomit-inducing sight yesterday was watching all the Tory Brexiteers queueing up to praise her when it was they who had stabbed her in the back.

The National feels unable to pay May any tribute. As regular readers may recall, we were banned from her last desperate attempt to convince the Scottish press and public that her Brexit deal might work.

We gave her the blank page treatment, and it was pleasing to see Private Eye, no less, copying our tactic with their May legacy issue.

Ian Hislop and the Eye crew got it right, for what was May’s contribution in nearly nine years as Home Secretary and Prime Minister? It’s nothing personal for us, but any objective analysis must conclude that Theresa May has been a disaster in office, an inadequate and sub-standard politician in an era of such creatures, someone with all the warmth of Cruella de Vil, only minus the glamour.

READ MORE: Hypocritical Tories pay tribute to Prime Minister they hated

Let’s deal with that first job. It was May who created the hostile environment on immigration, and as we repeatedly reported, it was May’s time in the Home Office that saw so many deportation decisions overturned by Scottish judges.

It was she, and not Amber Rudd, who created the Windrush scandal. Rudd quit saying the public outrage was justifiable, as it was, but May should have taken the blame and resigned for her past sins.

Back in 2013, two vans carrying the racist slogan “go home or face arrest,” aimed at undocumented immigrants, were driven around the country in 2013. It was a pilot project and went no further after the Advertising Standards Authority banned it for being misleading – she always was one for peddling duff stats. Oh, and fast forward to this month and there’s May telling Donald Trump his ‘go home’ tweets were “completely unacceptable”.

The National: Trump

Remember her vitriol against the European Convention on Human Rights? We’ll scrap it said May as Home Secretary. No we won’t, said May as PM.

She picked a fight with the Police Federation – never a clever thing to do if you’re the Home Secretary – and inevitably had to perform a u-turn. She has since shown several times that the lady is for turning...

In 2010, she promised to bring net immigration down to under 100,000. In her final full year in the Home Office, it rose to 298,000. And let’s not even go there with the Borders Agency scandals.

David Cameron kept here on as Home Secretary where she proved a reluctant champion of Remain. Yet she was still clear on her feelings prior to the 2016 referendum: “on balance...I believe the case to remain a member of the European Union is strong”.

The u-turn was quick in coming after Cameron quit – for she needed to espouse Brexit to become PM.

In No 10, she u-turned on such issues as increased national insurance for the self-employed and the policy of letting workers onto company boards.

Her response to the Grenfell Tower fire showed the worst side of May. Emotionless, robotic and above all late on the scene. Known for her mastery of any brief, she failed at the one thing a Prime Minister needs – the human touch.

By far her worst mistake was to call a general election in 2017. “There isn’t going to be one. It isn’t going to happen. There is not going to be a general election,” said May’s spokesman in March of that year. A month later she called one, ostensibly to get the support she needed for her Brexit deal.

Instead she lost her overall majority, bought the DUP with an odious bribe, and then completely screwed up Brexit with a deal that nobody bar her and some sycophants liked.

Her worst legacy is to leave us with a poundland Donald Trump, a premier whose only probable achievement will be to make Theresa May look adequate. Which she wasn’t.