IT’S easy to knock Theresa May. Her decision to call the General Election was quite clearly a massive mistake.

Her conduct of the campaign left a great deal to be desired; the manifesto which she presumably approved was amongst "the longest suicide notes in English political history". She quite plainly does not have the charm and charisma of a David Cameron or Tony Blair; nor does she have the backbone and determination of a Margaret Thatcher or Winston Churchill. She is often depicted as ‘cold’ or even ’unfriendly’ and certainly does not have the bonhomie of a Macmillan or Callaghan. No-one seems to doubt that she will not be the Tory leader and PM at the next General Election in five years’ time. It’s a question of ‘when she goes’ and ‘how’ not ‘if’?

Yet for all that, there are several things to be admired about her as she heads off to the Alps for what must be a very welcome three-week walking holiday. (There’s something endearingly old fashioned about a PM on a walking holiday. Reminiscent of Harold Wilson and the Scilly Isles?) The first is that despite the demonstrable catastrophe of the election, she has not simply thrown her toys out of the pram and "gone off down the garden to eat worms." Despite the appalling press of recent weeks, she has kept at it; and that is very probably what the country (and the financial markets) needed – a degree of calm in a whirlwind world.

Second, she has actually performed very well at PMQs, despite the pretty open goal staring at Mr Corbyn every Wednesday. She does command the House, and defend her Government despite all the odds.

She is also going to lengths to correct all that was initially wrong with her administration. Her two blameworthy special advisers were chopped the morning after the election to be replaced by my old friend and universally liked and respected Gavin Barwell. (He and Chief Whip Gavin Williamson – the ‘two Gavins’ - are a formidable pair.)

Damian Green is an extremely safe pair of hands, as her effective deputy, and her mini-reshuffle seems to have put more or less the right people in more or less the right round holes.

And she has taken steps to listen to her backbenchers. She has made a larger series of appearances in Parliament in the last month or two than any PM I can remember, and has had groups of us over to Number Ten to listen to our views – of the election and of Brexit. I was one of six last week who had an hour or so round the Cabinet Table with her, and she really did seem to be taking our views seriously.

So I have never really been a massive fan – in private or in public. But I do take my hat off to her performance in the last few turbulent weeks, and I wish her well for her holiday. Let’s have some more of the same after it, and life may start to look a little less gloomy.