Theresa May presents Brexit: the third-rate village pantomine

First as tragedy, then as farce. And when that’s exhausted, all that’s left is a third-rate village pantomime. Brexit can make fools of the cleverest people, so has a field day making fools of fools. As a general rule when you haven’t got anything to say, it’s best to say nothing. But Theresa May is now so hopelessly crushed and disorientated, she felt obliged to come to the Commons to give a statement on what hadn’t happened. She hoped this made her sound as if she was still in control of the negotiations, but only proved she wasn’t.

“Cool, calm heads are needed,” the prime minister began. Apparently in all seriousness. So that’s it. We’re screwed, as there wasn’t a cool, calm head on view. Just varying levels of panic, disbelief, anger and comic self-delusion. May pressed on. The government had made real progress in the negotiations, by managing to agree what needed to be negotiated. These days you have to be thankful for small mercies.

Still, that was all positively coherent compared to what followed. May appeared to have forgotten she had already agreed to a Northern Ireland backstop last December and was now asking the Commons to share her outrage that the EU wasn’t prepared to rubber-stamp the UK’s attempts to renegotiate the backstop agreement with another that included the whole of the UK. Confused? You ought to be. When May started talking about “the backstop to the backstop”, a little piece of everyone died inside.

By now the prime minister was running on full Maybot. She wanted the backstop to be temporary but we shouldn’t get too worked up about finalising an end date because she hoped there would be no need ever for it to come into operation. Basically, she was waiting on a miracle. “No deal is better than a bad deal,” she concluded. “But a no deal outcome is one that no wants.” So something no one wanted was somehow better than something else that no one wanted. At which point logic died and her circuit boards melted.

Jeremy Corbyn was initially little more coherent. Confusion breeds confusion. He’s taken to opening every reply to a prime ministerial Brexit statement with a declaration of Groundhog Day. Which could have been construed as self-satire were he to have a sense of humour. Or was aware of the fact that he’d previously made the Groundhog Day gag. Gradually, though, he stumbled back to consciousness and invited the government to consider Labour’s option of remaining in the customs union. A plan for which there was a majority in parliament and would largely deal with the Northern Ireland problem.

“We never hear what a better deal from Labour is,” May barked. Sometimes she might find it helpful to actually listen to the questions, rather than just repeat the white noise that her programmers have installed.

Things didn’t improve when Boris Johnson intervened. Such is his desperation to be taken seriously these days that the former foreign secretary had brushed his hair specially for the occasion. But looking like a 12-year-old schoolboy isn’t a particularly winning look and very few MPs even on his own benches are now prepared to give him the time of day.

If Brexit has achieved one good thing it is to do for Boris. He is now a near empty carapace. All that is left is vanity and blind narcissistic ambition. He misses the point when he argues that the UK is fed up with being ruthlessly pushed around by the EU. The truth is much closer to home. The UK is fed up with being ruthlessly dicked around by him. The leader of the opposition is shameless, he declared. There was no way back for Boris from that. Even by his low standards that was shameless hypocrisy. There hasn’t been a more shameless politician than Boris this century.

As a chorus of other Brexiters promised to self-destruct on 1 January 2021 – if only – May merely repeated, “Let me be clear” time and time again, a sure sign that she was now going to be anything but. It’s one of her default settings under pressure. Not a single MP from either side of the house voiced any confidence in her negotiating abilities. It was unity of sorts.

She had no answer to anything. Other than to insist that nothing had changed, everything was going exactly to plan, she wasn’t going to give any time limit for a temporary backstop as it wasn’t going to be needed and there wouldn’t be a people’s vote because the people had already voted in favour of making themselves worse off. The closest she came to coherence was an insistence that the UK would be leaving the UK. That at least sounded about right. Prepare to despair.