May’s breakup speech made Brexit sound magical … if you’re drinking Bacardi | Marina Hyde

I increasingly picture Brexit as one of those criminally underwhelming Christmas theme parks in which the UK specialises. You know the ones: visitors are sold expensive tickets to a magical wonderland, and turn up expectantly to find a muddy car park with brawling elves, a grotto that turns out to be two strings of fairy lights inside a Portaloo, and a chained, motionless husky you tell your kids is “probably just sleeping”. There are at least a couple of these festive horror shows annually. As one of the elves at the infamous Lapland New Forest informed customers a few years back: “Santa’s gone home. Santa’s fucking dead.” The two men who sold tickets to that one on a false prospectus ended up being sentenced to 13 months each.

I see Boris Johnson is still redrafting his Brexit prospectus, most recently in a Daily Telegraph article that spent much of the week threatening to derail Theresa May’s major speech, if not to presage his own resignation. Why? Because that’s just the shit the Tories pull these days. There is nothing so perilously unstable they couldn’t somehow contrive to destabilise it further. Nothing gets them hotter than the clock ticking or the possibility of running each other out. Instead of taking back control they find new ways to be incontinent. You can tell the people who got us into this mess were former journalists, because despite having just the 50 years to work out what type of deal they wanted, the cabinet is doing it right on deadline.

And so to May’s speech, heralded by some as a big reset that would clarify a UK approach that might hitherto have been euphemised as cryptic. It took place in front of a backdrop reading: “Shared history. Shared challenges. Shared future”, which is Italian for “Is it too late if we stop being delusional? It is, isn’t it?” The Florentine location suggested that the government has now spent easily as much time laying the ground for multi-layered Renaissance metaphors as they have wondering vaguely what’s going to happen to the automotive industry in 18 months’ time.

That said, the odd thing does seem to have become clearer. May has now asked for a two-year transition deal, which would give the UK unfettered access to the single market in return for us accepting both free movement and the fact that Nigel Farage is going to completely wet his pants.

The optics in Florence were slightly better for May than they were at her speech at the UN earlier this week, which pictures showed was as sparsely attended as a one-woman Edinburgh fringe show about self-harm. Delivery-wise, though, there were no surprises. The prime minister came across as the most humourless and uptight Brit in Florence since Maggie Smith threw open her casement at the start of A Room With a View and discovered the prospect of a brick wall. “I thought we were going to see the Arno,” says Helena Bonham-Carter, in the tone of voice one might otherwise reserve for the observation: “I thought there was going to be a grotto”, or “I thought we were going to have an extra £350m a week for the NHS.”

For the past few months, May’s messaging strategy has been predicated on the fact that the EU doesn’t have the internet. Thus you can spend a year being as rude and dismissive about them as you like for the benefit of the media back home, then fly to Europe and smilingly urge them to “be creative”, and everyone will take kindly to it.

To call the speech optimistic didn’t really cover it. Many of the lines had the flavour of something you’d say if you were leaving your wife of 40 years for a Babestation presenter who’d once read out one of your texts. This period could be remembered “not for a relationship that ended, but a new partnership that began”. Well, I mean … it COULD be. If you’re drinking Bacardi. (Incidentally, my favourite story of the week suggested that civil servants in David Davis’s department are so concerned about the lack of preparation for a no-deal scenario that they have begun writing emails stating the perils, to cover their backs in preparation for the inevitable Chilcot-style inquiry when it all goes tits up.)

This was a breakup speech that again reminded Europe it was not us; it was them. But the fact remains that if you had killer information that you had to protect at all costs, the text of a Theresa May speech would be the place to conceal it. So instantly forgettable is anything she says that it is highly possible she has been fitted with a perception filter.

Thanks to advance briefings, we already knew that Britain would fork out at least £20bn by way of an exit bill, which Boris Johnson has repeatedly suggested we shouldn’t pay. At least when the Bullingdon Club smashed things up they left a cheque at the end. Then again, in later life Boris has been – how to put this delicately because of the others involved? – less present to deal with the consequences of his actions. I suppose on the scale of things one can just walk away from in life, the EU isn’t the most unforgivable.

As for Boris’s own manoeuvres, his allies seem to think he has done enough this week to be able to resign later and say he told them so. What a man of principle he remains. I am reminded of a passage I shrieked with laughter at in his book about Churchill (a work that obviously turned out to be a thinly veiled fantasy portrait of himself). “To some extent all politicians are gamblers with events,” this ran. “They try to anticipate what will happen, to put themselves on the right side of history.”

Remarkably, Boris characterised Churchill’s 1930s opposition to Hitler as just this type of self-motivated punt. Churchill “put his shirt on a horse called anti-Nazism … and his bet came off in spectacular fashion”. Dear, dear. If only we had Churchill’s other column – the one where he argued the case for a fascist dictatorship, Lebensraum and the elimination of Jews from Germany. Still, as Johnson went on to note, these kind of reputation-stakings “gave him the chance to test his egocentric thesis that he was special”.

At least the focus returning to May on Friday afternoon offered a brief opportunity to forget Brexit’s Special One. But for the prime minister’s part, her speech showed her to have once again identified the wrong sort of deficit in her Brexit approach. The problem is not that she hasn’t been positively, repetitively platitudinous enough – it is that she has never begun to outline the specific negatives to those expecting a cakewalk. She may never acquire the courage to admit it – and her less washed-up colleagues are still too treacherously ambitious to do so – but Santa’s gone home.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist