Laws of Maybotics collapse in PM's theatre of the absurd

Shortly after lunch, Graham Brady received another letter of no confidence in the prime minister. This one was from the Four Pot Plants. Enough was enough. The laws of Maybotics had finally collapsed in on themselves. Theresa May had backed herself into a corner in which every course of action ended in extreme self-harm.

In the morning May had sent Michael Gove out on to Radio 4’s Today programme to insist that Tuesday’s vote on the government’s Brexit deal would go ahead as planned. Hours later, her spokesperson made the same assurances to lobby journalists. Within minutes, it was announced that the prime minister had changed her mind. The deal that had previously been not just the right deal but also the only deal on the table had turned out to be the wrong deal and there was another one on offer after all. Maybe.

“I’ve listened very carefully,” May said to widespread laughter at the opening of her statement to the Commons on her volte-face. And the person she had been listening to was her chief whip. The numbers were terrible. She wasn’t just going to lose the vote she was going to be totally humiliated. So she had chosen to do what she always does in such circumstances. She had swapped one humiliation for another. Who cared if the pound tanked and the stock market crashed, just so long as she could defer some of the pain for a later date? Masochism can do strange things to a person.

Having explained why everything had changed, May retreated into her default coping mechanism: denial. It was almost too excruciatingly painful to watch. The disintegration of a prime minister, a country turned into an international laughing stock. Nothing had changed. Nothing had changed. Her deal was still exactly the right deal apart from the bits that weren’t quite right. And what she was planning to do was to go back to the EU in the hope of getting a few more commas, that had no legal authority, inserted into the future declaration. Anything to buy time.

Nothing had changed. Nothing had changed. It had never been her intention to hold a vote on Tuesday because Tuesday had been cancelled and tomorrow was now officially going to be declared to be Wednesday. Apart from anything else, it had come to her attention that many MPs had been working very hard of late and she wanted to give them a day off either to watch Parliament TV on catchup TV – who wouldn’t want to watch reruns of a three-day debate that had been totally pointless? – or to do their Xmas shopping. No one could accuse May of being reluctant to put her lack of credibility on the line.

For once, Jeremy Corbyn was heard in silence. Not just because he was more forensic than usual in his dismantling of the prime minister’s insistence that she was planning to renegotiate something the EU had already said was non-negotiable, but also because MPs on all sides were still reeling from May’s opening statement. Either her systems were now malfunctioning so badly she couldn’t help contradicting herself, or she had finally lost all sense of shame. And self-respect. Even the mirror could no longer look her in the face.

The Speaker intervened to observe that it would be a pathetic show of weakness for the government to unilaterally pull the vote rather than to allow the Commons to have a say on pulling the vote. May visibly shrank into the frontbench, shaking her head furiously and willing herself to disappear into the green leather. If she couldn’t win a meaningful vote she didn’t stand a prayer of winning a vote on not holding a vote.

It soon became clear that May’s dadaist theatre of the absurd had only succeeded in changing one person’s mind. Before her babbles of mindlessnessnessness, Kenneth Clarke had indicated he was prepared to vote with the government. Now he had withdrawn his consent. Shitshow didn’t begin to cover today’s proceedings. This was an embarrassment on a truly global scale. Something even Donald Trump would have difficulty explaining away. Every other MP merely repeated their previous opinions. May was still staring vacantly at defeat.

Not that she cared. By now she had gone entirely rogue, making up policy on the hoof. She even declared it had never been her intention to hold the vote the following day and that 21 January had been the key date. Even the cabinet looked embarrassed by this. There was only one explanation that now made sense. The prime minister had taken a huge bet with Paddy Power on her still being in a job by Christmas. She just hadn’t read the small print. When the fun stops, stop.