May’s delirious cabinet is in denial about who really controls Brexit | Matthew d’Ancona

In the chilling Edgar Allan Poe story The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, a terminally ill man seeks to be hypnotised at the point of death, suspended “in an unusually perfect state of mesmeric trance”. The grotesque experiment appears to work. As Valdemar lies in a stupefied limbo, his doctors are forced to concede that death has “been arrested by the mesmeric process”.

Theresa May’s government experienced something disturbingly close to this in the hours that followed the exit poll on the night of 8 June. The loss of her Commons majority was an electoral disaster, a calamitous weakening of the authority that the prime minister had explicitly sought to enhance in the first place.

With the lethal speed that is a Tory speciality, her cabinet colleagues conspired through the early hours of 9 June. According to Tim Shipman’s new book, Fall Out, extracted in the Sunday Times, Philip Hammond indicated to Boris Johnson that he was open to the idea of the foreign secretary succeeding May.

I find this remarkable story plausible, and not only because Shipman is a first-rate journalist. Whether or not Hammond was, as Johnson reportedly claimed, “100% behind me if I go for it”, the chancellor would have surveyed the charred battleground and weighed his options with ruthless clarity. If Johnson were to gain momentum in the race to succeed May, why not cut a deal with him quickly, stay on as chancellor, and keep a grip on the Brexit negotiations?

Except there was no race to succeed May. Instead, her moribund government was spared immediate extinction by a collective act of self-hypnosis. Precisely when they most needed to act with resolve, Tory MPs were paralysed by the scale of what had happened, by a curious mix of arrogance and self-loathing, and by a terror that the further upheaval of a leadership contest might hasten Jeremy Corbyn’s passage to No 10.

In a matter of days, it had become the settled view of the Conservative parliamentary party that the wrecked status quo was the least worst option. They conspired in the scapegoating of Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, May’s co-chiefs of staff, and the deplorable Commons deal with the Democratic Unionist party, purchased with £1.5bn of taxpayers’ money.

It still baffles me that this jerry-rigged settlement was ever thought to be sustainable. But so it was. Now, little more than three months on, it is starting to collapse under the weight of its internal contradictions. What better backdrop could Corbyn ask for as Labour gathers in Brighton?

Even in settled times, May’s decision to cling on and her party’s complicity in that choice would have been ill-judged. But these are scarcely settled times. The negotiations to work out the terms of Britain’s departure from the EU would test a prime minister with an impregnable Commons majority, a visibly united cabinet and a host of biddable allies on the continent. What chance does a leader as weakened and isolated as May have in the face of such a challenge?

To use the jargon beloved of political strategists, all the “framing” is wrong. Her speech on Brexit in Florence last week was meant to be a friendly but firm statement of principle, addressed to our soon-to-be-ex EU partners. Instead, it was perceived primarily as a response to Johnson’s 4,000-word article in the previous Saturday’s Daily Telegraph. The week had been dominated by the often farcical to and fro between May and her maverick foreign secretary, much of the drama played out in New York during the UN general assembly.

One moment, friends of Johnson were reportedly claiming that he was ready to resign. The next Johnson was singing the praises of his boss and her speech. The foreign secretary’s camp claimed that he had saved May from a rhetorical fiasco by redrafting the speech. Not so, insisted David Davis on today’s Andrew Marr Show.

What is certain is that Hammond will never again offer even tentative support to Johnson as a prospective leader. The foreign secretary’s followers are hailing him as the “Brexit martyr” who took a gigantic risk, forced the prime minister’s hand and saved the nation from another dastardly Brussels trap over money and jurisdiction.

The chancellor uses rather different language to describe Johnson’s recent conduct: the sort that would make navvies blush, in fact. For Hammond (who was a remainer), Brexit has always been a hugely technical challenge rather than a march towards a glorious national destiny.

By contrast, Johnson – who was, after all, the face of the leave campaign – sees himself as the keeper of the referendum flame, battling against bloodless technocracy to ensure an optimistic “Cry God for Harry” outcome. It is not true that he is uninterested in detail. It is just not what interests him most.

The Florence speech was meant, at least, to secure a measure of cabinet unity and has failed even in that respect. But the greater absurdity is that senior Tories are now squabbling semi-publicly as though it is they, rather than the EU 27, who will primarily dictate the form, cost and timescale of Brexit. Jorge Luis Borges famously described the Falklands war as two bald men fighting over a comb. Hammond and Johnson are two bald men arguing over a comb that belongs to somebody else.

This is worse than stalemate. It is the politics of delirium, in which in-fighting and delusion have conspired to distract too many senior Tories from the central facts of the case: first, that the terms of the deal will mostly be decided in Brussels; and second, that this government looks weaker by the day, more sickly, more vulnerable, in this age of brutal political volatility, to a truly terrible fate.

And Poe’s Valdemar? After seven months, he begs to be released from his zombie state. “As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes,” recalls the narrator, “amid ejaculations of ‘Dead! Dead!’ absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once – within the space of a single minute, or less, shrunk – crumbled – absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before the whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome – of detestable putrescence.”

No wonder Corbyn is smiling.

• Matthew d’Ancona is a Guardian columnist