The Guardian view on Theresa May’s predicament: humiliated at home and abroad

The events in Brussels should not be overstated, nor underplayed. The prime minister has been humiliated by European leaders. Theresa May’s bid for new Brexit concessions was icily rejected by European Union leaders. They did so in the rudest possible way, with snubs and curt dismissals in front of the press. It was not good for this country that Mrs May was caught on camera in a furious row with the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, who had publicly rebuked her hours earlier. EU leaders have left Mrs May isolated. But not as isolated as she is at home, where her backbenchers appear to want her gone and there remains no majority in parliament for her withdrawal agreement.

Rather than give up, the prime minister appears to be doubling down. More talks will follow, she says. This is unlikely to result in any movement forward, but there will not be any step back. Mrs May is stuck because the “pinstriped Robespierres” of the Brexit revolution had no plan to leave the EU. Their plan was to get out and magically time-travel back to the early 1970s – disregarding the fact that the world had moved on. The revolutionaries thought it was enough just to topple the old regime. Once that had been achieved, the more prosaic business of what comes next could be resolved.

As a quiet former remainer, Mrs May painted her red lines in the deepest crimson to assure the revolutionary Brexiters that there were no compromises to be made. For the Conservative party, the last two years have been an age of discovery, leading, for some, to an age of enlightenment. Mrs May began by ignoring unpleasant facts before repudiating them, only in time to recognise and concede them. If she had not seen the light, there would have been no withdrawal agreement. As Mrs May has faced up to reality, however, the hard Brexiters have issued cries of betrayal. Ministers, they ludicrously claim, are clearly corruptible. They refuse to accept that realist cabinet ministers honestly sought solutions to the problems the leavers created. Instead rightwing absolutists claim the Tory leadership have become slaves of remain orthodoxy even when advocating withdrawal from the EU.

If the Tory party cannot agree on Mrs May’s plans then it is no surprise that parliament cannot endorse them. The current row within the Tory party focuses on a provision – the Irish backstop – that may never take effect. The backstop is an insurance policy to ensure no border on the island of Ireland in the event that the UK and the EU cannot agree a post-Brexit relationship by 2022. Mrs May’s trip to Brussels was to beg for a form of words surrounding the exit mechanism to the backstop that would assuage objections that Britain isn’t free to leave it unilaterally. The failure over the backstop is an admission in effect that the Brexit revolutionaries either do not want a partnership agreement by 2022 or do not think they will get one by that time. The suspicion is that if the hard Brexiters cannot reach a no-deal outcome now, then they would like another go in four years’ time. This is a recipe for chaos and self-harm on a national scale, and needs to be stopped.

The economic circumstances of the EU and the UK have been knotted together in the last four decades to such an extent that it seems obvious that their prospects cannot be independent over any foreseeable horizon. Hard Brexiters ought to have figured out what shape they wanted the new regime to have before they got rid of the old one. Instead they have used confusion to prosecute their fantasies. Mrs May ought to end the delusions and, for the country’s sake, take a no-deal Brexit off the table for good.