Inertia-gripped May lets the clock keep ticking

Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. With just 45 days to go until the UK leaves the EU, the government still has no idea on what terms a deal – if any – can be reached. Nor does anyone seem particularly bothered. We are now in a world where the prime minister can rewrite history, Gavin Williamson can declare war on China, Chris Grayling has mystic visions of non-existent ferries and no one bats an eyelid. Shares in Mogadon have rocketed as parliament sleepwalks towards Brexit.

Theresa May couldn’t believe her luck. At the very least, she had expected some grief for having missed yet another essay deadline. But everyone appeared to have forgotten she had missed the previous deadline. And the one before that. And the one before that. Even better, no one even asked her if she had made any progress since the last deadline she had missed. Which was just as well because she hadn’t made any.

Instead, in her latest statement to the Commons on what she hadn’t been doing to push the Brexit peanut forward, the prime minister was allowed to get away with reading out a letter she had written to Jeremy Corbyn some days earlier about how – sucks teeth – everything was very tricky but though she really, really cared about workers’ rights – yawn – she couldn’t possibly agree to a customs union as the ERG wouldn’t go for it. So thanks, but no thanks.

Everyone should just hold their nerve and continue to do nothing very much. Time to take a leaf out of David Cameron’s playbook and chillax a little. It was clear the EU wasn’t going to change its mind on reopening the withdrawal agreement, so she would just waste a bit of time in pointless meetings and run down the clock a little further. Then, when it was too late to do anything else, she’d give MPs a choice of either voting for her deal, which they’d already rejected, or taking a chance on no deal. She was easy either way. It was no skin off her nose as she’d be gone as prime minister by the summer anyway.

As so often, May was given a helping hand by the Labour leader. He and the prime minister are locked in a symbiotic death spiral; they are going to miss each other when they’re gone. Even if no one else will. Corbyn’s main failing is that his memory is almost as bad as May’s. He had a vague inkling that she had missed countless previous deadlines and that time was running out, but he just couldn’t remember the details precisely sufficiently to pin her down.

Corbyn did just about get round to asking when the meaningful vote would take place, but that was about that. So rather than call out May and insist on tabling an amendment to extend article 50 – heaven forbid he’d be seen to do anything to delay Brexit in order to get a better deal – he was reluctantly happy to give her another two-week extension. But he was putting her on a final warning here and now that if she missed this extension then he’d have to give her another two-week extension in a fortnight’s time.

A few MPs did try to make a stand. The SNP’s Ian Blackford called the prime minister a liar – it’s so hard to tell if she’s not telling the truth or just delusional – an outburst for which he was forced to apologise. Meanwhile, the usual suspects of Labour’s Hilary Benn, Yvette Cooper, Rachel Reeves and Ed Miliband along with Conservatives Anna Soubry, Dominic Grieve, Justine Greening and Heidi Allen implored May to treat Brexit as something more than a minor piece of internal Tory party management.

May wasn’t having any of it. Rather, she was encouraged by the fact that almost all her MPs had long since left the chamber. They’d heard it all before and it was now in one ear and out the other. If they weren’t going to have their heads in the sand in the Commons then they were going to have their noses in the trough in the cafe.

The few who did remain, including the Stockholm syndrome-struck Nicky Morgan, congratulated her on her brilliant negotiating skills that had resulted in precisely no new concessions whatsoever, and urged her to take another two weeks in achieving nothing. Dominic Raab even concluded that if the UK were to leave with no deal it would be entirely the EU’s fault for trying to agree a deal with someone quite so stupid as him while he had briefly been Brexit secretary.

Two and a quarter hours in, the tedium finally came to an end. Nothing had happened. Nothing had changed. Just the way May liked it. Inertia was her default programme setting. Let the clocks keep ticking. And strike thirteen.