Maybot is beyond a reboot, buffering in Brussels

“Let me be very nebulous.” If only Theresa May could manage that then the UK might be in with a shout of surviving Brexit. Just a hint of a hint of certainty amid an ocean of vagueness might offer the faintest glimmer of hope. But all the prime minister can run to now is complete and utter despair. She has finally reached peak futility. Truly she is a leader for our times.

It can’t go on like this for much longer. Something has to give. Even someone as semi-detached as the Maybot has a breaking point. She is well beyond the point where a simple reboot via the control-alt-delete keys can restore her to her factory settings. She is now experiencing such a total systems overload that she couldn’t begin to pass the Turing test.

The prime minister more and more resembles the lone, almost silent hero of a spaghetti western, armed only with a water pistol. We all know it will end in a slow-motion finale, with a plaintive surround-sound Ennio Morricone score. And what makes it even more weird is that everyone will be rooting for her. It’s a bewildering irony that the entire country can empathise with a leader whose most striking feature is her lack of empathy.

May arrived some 75 minutes late for her press conference at the end of an EU summit in which she had been humiliated yet again. The strain was evident. She was hunched – almost bent in two – and could only move in short, jerky movements. As if she was buffering. The spinning circle of doom might have been preferable. Her voice was in no better shape. She is now reduced to staccato croaks in which the words don’t even come out as intelligible sentences. The prime minister at her incoherent best.

“Let me. Be ve. Ry clear,” she began, her eyes darting around the room for just one friendly face. What followed was little short of delusional, and reporters shifted uneasily in their seats. It’s not comfortable watching someone fall apart in front of your eyes. Especially when that person increasingly resembles Dr Strangelove and has their finger on the nuclear button.

Up until now, the Brexit negotiations that were supposed to have been concluded last October – in order to give everyone enough time to sign off the deal – have been presented by May as quantum physics. Small movements forward, imperceptible to the naked eye. Now we were in the realms of homeopathy. There was no progress. Not even a trace of progress. We were down to the mere memory of progress. And all the stronger for it.

The absence of the reassurances that the prime minister had been hoping to receive about the backstop were a sign of just how much the 27 EU countries were fully committed to offering those reassurances. The fact that Juncker had described her as nebulous was a mark of respect for her precision. It was time to focus on the focusing. To embark on the future relationship as if it actually existed rather than as just an illusion. We were lost in Cloud Nebulous. Blake’s 7 had better plot lines than this. And actors.

Nor did her answers to questions provide any more clarity. The more frequently she said, “Let. Me be. Veryc. Lear,” the less sense she made. She had always been clear that the deal that had been negotiated was the only deal, which was why she had come back to the EU to tell them it was not up for renegotiation. It was time for the EU to stop asking for meaningless reassurances to the meaningless reassurances to the meaningless reassurances. She’d had enough of the 27 calling all these emergency EU summits. Either her deal got voted down or ... Or her deal got voted down. After that it was anyone’s guess.

All May could say for certain was that she was very clear she had been very clear. At one point she tried to make a joke about what a crap week she’d had but no one laughed. The prime minister has no sense of comic timing and frightens people when she tries to smile. Apart from which, the situation had long since stopped being funny. We were seemingly stuck in purgatory, where we had been for the last two years, circling pointlessly with no end in sight. Even hell might be preferable.