Theresa May broke her promises to the North - Jayne Dowle

Looking at the droopy cardigans and cleavage-revealing vests that pass for back-bencher office-wear, this is not exactly a difficult accolade to achieve. However, can you too recall those natty leopard-print kitten heels and that directional soft leather jacket she had? Perhaps not. These days she’s more likely to be found with her hiking anorak zipped over her head, hiding behind the sofa. There’s a lot of water gone under Westminster Bridge since Mrs May was rocking up to the Palace of Westminster as the Home Secretary, suited and booted as if she meant business.

Which she did. Arguments will rage about the swingeing police force cuts she presided over and the startling rise in knife crime which has engulfed the country since. And of course, there’s her contribution to the ‘hostile environment’ which has seen so many distraught members of the Windrush generation turn into stateless numbers lost somewhere in the Home Office system.

And then, there’s more or less everybody else. In her first statement as Prime Minister two years ago, she made a direct address to the millions of ‘JAM’ or‘‘just about managing’ families. For a brief moment, it looked as if there was compassion there, even understanding.

It seemed as if the Tory party, tainted by the Old Boys’ club that was the Cameron administration, was actually coming to its senses and realising its remit needed to stretch further than the Cotswolds. As Mrs May pointed out in her speech, “if you’re from an ordinary working-class family, life is much harder than many people in Westminster realise.” From a Tory politician, this was potentially explosive. How excited was the nation? OK. Not that excited, but at least it was an acknowledgement that austerity was crippling us.

Sadly, as subsequent events have proved, it really was a case of ‘JAM tomorrow’, because in the chaos of Brexit failures which followed, millions of those ‘ordinary working-class families’ were entirely forgotten. Which is how we explain the extraordinary rebirth of Nigel Farage and the mortal threat his Brexit Party now holds over the Conservatives.

Still, I feel duty-bound to remind you of what she once was. I would also like to point out that more than any other politician I can think of, ever, Mrs May has used her position to reform the laws relating to domestic abuse and caused us all to reconsider exactly what it means.

Without her dogged intervention, countless victims and their families would never have been able to bring to court the offence of coercive control, a series of behaviours in a close relationship which cause severe psychological damage and too often end in tragedy. When the history books come to be written, it won’t be this achievement – or her kitten heels – that will be committed to print however.

It will be her disastrous stint as Prime Minister, a tenure in which she has brought Great Britain to the brink of disaster, and also presided over the disintegration of her own political party. What perhaps might also be overlooked are the promises she made to the North of England.

Can it really be only last summer that she shifted her Cabinet meeting to Gateshead and reaffirmed her plans to bolster the Northern Powerhouse? Of course, we all knew that the delegation of ministers she led were only here to secure support for the Chequers Brexit plan – remember that as well? Still, it seemed that she at least acknowledged that if the UK economy was to thrive in a post-Brexit world, it had to be balanced.

At the time, she confirmed that up to £780m was being set aside, from previously announced funding, for a pre-planned East Coast mainline upgrade. Also during her time in Downing Street she has maintained a strong committed line on HS2, despite growing questions over the increasingly distorted cost/benefit ratio to people living in our region. However, her trip up North last year only went so far. In April, during a heated Commons debate, MPs demanded that she defend her government’s decision to block a Yorkshire-wide devolution deal. The best she could come up with, after years of brokering by the One Yorkshire campaign, was a weak promise that “we do need to find the right proposals that will suit the area”. Nothing much of consequence has been heard of these proposals since.

Despite everything she said – and not just about One Yorkshire – she literally retreated to her Westminster bunker and pulled up the shutters. Mrs May forgot her many potential friends in the North and in return they have tried to forget about her. The shoes, perhaps, might be her best legacy after all.