Blue Monday for MPs as May strategy proves futile once more

Tell me why I don’t like Mondays. The sense of futility is getting to everyone. Though many MPs usually welcome the chance to do next to nothing other than repeat themselves, even they have their limits of despair. And a Theresa May statement in which she reiterates her determination to pursue a Brexit strategy that has already been voted down by parliament is a step too far for everyone.

We’ve now reached the point where even the EU has taken to rejecting her latest plans to reopen negotiations before she has got round to announcing them. Because she is that predictable. And that delusional.

This was the sixth Monday afternoon out of the last seven on which May had given a Brexit statement in the Commons and it was by far the most dismal. Primarily because the prime minister appeared to have no understanding about the imminence of the Brexit date.

The greater the urgency, the slower and more evasive she becomes. Come 29 March, she could effectively be flatlining. Though how anyone would know the difference is another matter. Even at her best, May has always operated on the edges of consciousness. Not so much artificial intelligence as artificial stupidity.

The prime minister began by saying she had been listening to politicians from other parties. It was just a shame it had all been white noise; though she had been delighted Jeremy Corbyn had not bothered to waste her time by turning up to ask for something she had no intention of giving. It had saved a great deal of time for both of them and gave her the moral high ground. Basically what people had to remember was that in a straight fight between the national interest and keeping the more extreme wing of the Tory party on board, the ERG would win hands down.

So here was the plan. She couldn’t possibly rule out a no-deal because that would involve extending article 50. And that was something to which she couldn’t agree because that would be tantamount to kicking the can further down the road. This from a prime minister whose only identifiable talent is for kicking cans down the road. As so often, the only person whom the irony escaped was May. Plus ça change.

Indeed the sole purpose of the prime minister’s current statement was to waste at least a couple of weeks on doing nothing very much in the hope that enough of her MPs would be bored into submission and forget that they had already voted against the Plan A which she was resubmitting as a Plan B.

It was like watching a five-year-old child bungling a card trick while the grown-ups pretended not to notice. A prime minister with any sense of self-worth would have resigned long ago. The sense of shame would be unbearable.

The Labour leader is not averse to a bit of Brexit can-kicking himself – why make a decision when the Tories are screwing things up brilliantly on their own? – but now he appeared like a model of clarity. Which bit of the EU saying it would not renegotiate the backstop hadn’t she understood over the past 18 months? The time had come for her to drop her red lines and adopt proposals that could command the support of the majority of MPs.

“La, la, la,” May snapped, sticking her fingers in her ears. She had her plan. And just because it had failed once there was no reason why it should fail a second time. Hadn’t she always said that a bad deal was better than a no-deal?

Thereafter a succession of MPs from both sides of the house became increasingly exasperated as they tried and failed to talk her out of her madness. The more rational they became about the need to consider a customs union, extending Article 50 and a second referendum, the more adamant the prime minister became that the road to glory was paved with failure. One can only hope May is busy stockpiling her own medication. If she’s like this now, I’d hate to imagine what she’ll be like when she’s forced to go cold turkey at the end of March.

Labour’s Barry Sheerman tried to instil a note of optimism. Today was Blue Monday. Officially the most depressing day of the year. So could they take a rain check and come back tomorrow when they all might be feeling slightly less bleak. May declined. The very idea was an affront. She hadn’t got where she was today by doing anything to give people cause for optimism. There was no situation she could not make worse. And she’d started, so she would finish.