Turns out that anytime her government actually decides anything then one or other faction of her party gets quite cross. Who would have thought it?
The row over National Insurance contributions is a very simple case in point. May appointed Hammond in the vain hope that having someone half way sensible in the Chancellor's role might mitigate some of the worst excesses of the far right that now dominates her cabinet. So he proceeded to try and deliver what he thought was a safe pair of hands budget.
Leave aside for a moment the fact that the budget completely ignored the big long term problems we all face. The environment, the massive UK balance of payments problem and the build up of yet another uncontrolled financial bubble didn't feature. Instead Hammond did a bit of modest tinkering to tidy up an anomaly that leaves self employed people paying a lot less National Insurance than employed people and provides a huge incentive to create artificially self employed jobs.
The result was a storm of protest over how hard this was on White Van Man and the fastest climb down in budget history. Hammond's position now looks deeply insecure. More important May looks like a lady who is quite keen on turning. Providing she can put the blame on someone else for a move she must have known about in advance.
Emboldened by one victory her back benchers are now gearing up for another fight. They have just discovered that if you cut education spending in real terms for long enough then schools eventually end up short of money. School Head Teachers from up and down the country are very politely but firmly explaining to their local MP exactly how deeply their income will drop next year and exactly what the consequences will be.
Way back in the dim and distant past when Osborne was in charge of UK finances - instead of building up his own - those Conservative back benchers cheered to the rafters when he told them he was making tough choices but the worst of the austerity would really begin to bite safely after the 2015 General Election. Now those same cheering back benchers are starting to realise that they will have to explain to the Mums and Dads who voted for them why their local primary school is losing two teachers. That is the kind of cut that parents notice as their child ends up taught in huge classes alongside a lot of kids of very different ages with different needs and comes home unhappy.
What makes all this worse is that the loss of two teachers is the average impact on a primary school. Along with the overall cut in school funding and increased bills for national insurance and pension contributions, schools are also facing the impact of a new "fairer" funding system. When a Conservative talks about funding being "fairer" it is a good idea to ask the simple question: "fairer for who?" The answer is very simple. The impact on cuts in safe Tory seats in Shire Counties is lessened. The impact on inner city schools is even worse than the average.
No wonder Conservatives in marginal seats are getting a touch nervous. Defending education cuts of this size is very difficult. So is defending closure of local hospitals or medical centres as part of yet another top down re-organisation of NHS. That is now under way despite being the exact opposite of what Cameron promised at the 2010 election.
Many people voted Conservative at the last election because they thought in their heart of hearts that the worst period of austerity would now be over and they might as well let the Conservatives finish the job. That isn't what the average person is experiencing and certainly not what the typical young person faces. 9 years since the crash they are still waiting for their real incomes to return to the same level, still struggling to buy a decent home and still seeing services that they need getting steadily worse.
It isn't going to get better any time soon. In actuality the worst of the cuts were timed to impact over the next two years. Public service organisations have cut their staff's real incomes for 9 years and asked them to deliver a better service with less money per head across the whole of those 9 years. After 9 years of real term funding reductions the majority of public services are not in a position to cope with even larger cuts. That is exactly what they are now about to experience.
Then there is the small matter of the economic and policy uncertainty of Brexit. It could all go wonderfully smoothly and everyone could agree in the nicest possible way to a good deal and implement it in a spirit of collaboration and harmony. And pigs could fly. Provided of course that they are genetically modified battery farmed pigs coming from America under trade deals overseen by un-elected corporate lawyers. It could also be that the damage Brexit will do to the economy starts to become more and more obvious and the cock ups and bitter disputes increase by the day.
The critical question now is who gets the blame for all this. May has been cut a lot of slack by the electorate. She is riding high in the opinion polls because she emerged from the post referendum chaos as one of the few politicians who kept her head and looked like she might actually be able to run the country. Yet the Institute of Fiscal Studies has told us that real wages for the average person are not going to be any higher until fifteen years after the crash. Delivering the worst improvement in standards of living since the war isn't a great way to win hearts and minds.
Brexit is hard enough to handle. Add in a battle between a fantasy far right and the old core of the party that believed they joined to secure sensible economic policies and life looks harder. Then consider an electorate that has had no wage increase for fifteen years. Throw into the mix increasingly visible crises in the public services that people value. Then add the risk of a breakup of the United Kingdom as first Scotland and then Northern Ireland stares hard at the reality of an exit that they didn't vote for.
Life for May is about to get very hard indeed. I would offer her my deepest sympathy. But she lost that when she switched from carefully explaining to us how damaging it would be to leave the EU to informing us that we had to have a form of Brexit that is so hard no one dared tell voters about it during the referendum.