May had previously labelled “completely unacceptable” Trump’s call on Sunday for several Democratic congresswomen to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came”. On Tuesday, the US House of Representatives condemned the comments as racist.

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May is due to stand down as Conservative party leader next week, replaced by the winner of a members vote between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt. She is also expected to stand down as Prime Minister.

She said she had “no greater regret” than failing to deliver Brexit but blamed it on a “winner takes all” approach from UK Parliament where opinions had become polarised and driven by ideology.

Her speech, delivered to the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House, followed a feisty Question Time in the House of Commons where she delighted her colleagues by taking Jeremy Corbyn to task for his failure to deal with Labour’s internal anti-Semitism problems.

“He needs to apologise for his failure to deal with racism in the Labour party,” she said, quoting from a full-page advertisement that 60 Labour peers put in a newspaper on Wednesday morning saying the party “welcomes everyone… except, it seems, Jews”.

Corbyn responded by insisting anti-Semitism “has no place in our society, no place in either of our parties and no place in any of our dialogues”.

He pointed out that a survey found 60 per cent of Tory party members thought Islam was a threat to Western civilisation, and said he hoped the Prime Minister would act on Islamophobia within her own party – to which May nodded in reply.

In the Chatham speech, which May described as “personal reflections on the state of politics in our country and around the world”, she said there was a “great deal to feel optimistic about”.

She pointed to reductions in poverty and child mortality, and a movement towards concerted action to protect the environment.

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“When I was born, it was a crime to be a gay man, legal to discriminate on the basis of sex or race, and casual bigotry was a socially acceptable fact of daily life,” May said. “All that has changed – and greatly for the better.”

But future improvements depended on a “healthy body politic”, she said, and a willingness to compromise.

“Today an inability to combine principles with pragmatism and make a compromise when required seems to have driven our whole political discourse down the wrong path,” May said.

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“It has led to what is in effect a form of ‘absolutism’ – one which believes that if you simply assert your view loud enough and long enough you will get your way in the end. Or that mobilising your own faction is more important than bringing others with you.

“This is coarsening our public debate. Some are losing the ability to disagree without demeaning the views of others.”

May rejected as a “cynical falsehood” the view of Russian President Vladimir Putin, at this year’s G20 summit in Japan, that “the liberal idea has become obsolete”, saying it could be renewed through finding a “spirit of common purpose”.