In Sharm el Sheikh, May has shown herself to be a far more accomplished pool player than prime minister

It is important to make clear that, when the excruciating clip of Theresa May playing pool with the Italian prime minister cuts out on exactly one minute, her virginal strike of the cue ball sends it on what looks to be a clear trajectory towards the object ball. She has even managed to politely distance herself from the various cueing tips offered up by her chief of staff Gavin Barwell, a man who spent 2016 writing a book called How to Win A Marginal Seat and 2017 losing one. It is, in other words, a success.

I make this clear for one reason. It is a wonder of the modern information age that Monday 25 February 2019 should place into the public domain two pieces of footage of Theresa May, and the one that is being considered an embarrassment is the one where she makes a passable attempt at something she has never done before. And the one that no one appears to care about is the one in which she spectacularly fails, yet again, in her actual job.

The mark of greatness is always to make the impossible look effortless, and for that reason the cue-based games have long offered the clearest vantage point into sporting Valhalla. No amateur enthusiast can ever truly know what it feels like to be there, in the relentless moment of an elite level football match, so he can never appreciate in all its fullness the wonder of a Lionel Messi.

But anyone can understand the virtuosic gifts of a Ronnie O’Sullivan, because his art is so easy to replicate. You only need pick up a cue, approach a table, and your own stunning ineptitude will instantly show you the way.

It is a lesson Theresa May has learnt for the first time in Sharm el Sheikh. But she also offers a valuable public service on the flip side of this particular coin. For anyone watching her press conference, in all its Sisyphean misery, there might be a tendency to imagine the job of being prime minister is very very hard, because Theresa May makes it look so hard, because she is so very bad at it.

For this was not an international pool summit. It was a summit of world leaders, of which Theresa May is one. It is the most rarefied world of them all, and she has risen to its very highest heights. And yet, there appeared to be more significantly more basic competence on display in the hotel pool room than there was in its press conference centre hours later, when she failed to propel a single answer even vaguely towards any of the questions she had been asked.

Robert Peston wanted to know why she still thought she could leave the European Union with a deal that has been passed by the House of Commons by the 29 March, when absolutely everybody he or anybody else has spoken to have made it overwhelmingly clear that it can’t be done.

“We’re ensuring that we’re working hard to address the questions parliament has raised,” she replied. Her lips were moving, sound was coming out, but never before have the words sounded more like nothing more than a noise.

“What I am saying is that I am negotiating hard, with the European Union, to make sure we get a deal, with the support of parliament,” she continued, the same words, stuck in the same holding pattern, month after month after month.

Is there a strategy at play? Only she knows. But there are now just 32 days until Brexit, and by then, it may very well be that this prolonged project of government by water torture will have us all longing for the blessed relief of the cliff edge.