She made us wait, but my word it was worth it. Until now, Brexit had been a Russian Doll of hopeless expectation.
Two years of torturous negotiations begat six weeks of a deal being within “touching distance” begat seven long hours staring at the Downing Street door as a temporary microphone stand stood guard outside it like an obscure baronet grieving for a dead monarch.
But as Theresa May finally emerged from her own front door, at 7.16pm on Wednesday evening, its final irreducible layer was a nuclear bomb.
The cabinet had argued for five hours. No one had resigned. Her deal had been approved.
Her voice was only faintly audible from beneath the howls of “Stop Brexit” from protesters gathered at the gates 50 yards to her left, but she said these words: “When you strip away the detail, the choice before us is clear, this deal … Or leave with no deal, or no Brexit at all.”
Woah woah woah. Say what? No Brexit at all? But, but, but doesn’t that mean, and this really is quite the twist, that no deal has never actually been better than a bad deal, and that Brexit, actually, doesn’t mean Brexit?
As endings go, and this really was the ending, at least of this middle instalment of the Brexit sh*tshow trilogy of trilogies, you have to hand it to her.
As the TV cameras packed up and the news reporters went home, you could almost hear them muttering to one another in bewilderment like baffled cinema goers heading for the car park.
But, doesn’t that mean, doesn’t that mean, it was all bollocks, all along? Right from the start?
No, it can’t mean that. All of it? Rubbish? The whole thing? For two and half years?
Yeah. I think so. I think it does. Absolutely none of it was true. Not a word of it.
I mean, once you see it, it’s obvious isn’t it? None of it was ever true. Genius.
Well good news, because the sequel’s already started. Now Theresa May must somehow whittle those choices back down to one. (She really did say there’s a “choice”. That really happened.) She must put those genies back in the bottle. Because if you actually let, I don’t know, anyone normal, in the real world, have a choice between her deal, no deal and no Brexit at all, well, the thunderingly inevitably obvious awaits.
While inside 10 Downing Street, her front benchers were arguing over whether to finish her off, her backbenchers were arguing over exactly the same.
Rumours came and went that her 13 Scottish Tory MPs, the ones who saved her and her whole party at the 2017 election, would all fail to back the deal, because it didn’t do enough for Scottish fisheries.
The Democratic Unionist Party quietly let it be known their “confidence and supply” arrangement was low on confidence and even lower on supplies.
Members of the European Research Group made mutterings about “withdrawing support” for the prime minister, echoing the sentiments of their leader, Jacob Rees-Mogg, still the world’s only fully double-breasted anarchist.
In short, one side wants ice cream. The other wants lasagne. In the coming days Theresa May will try to forcefeed them all ice cream and lasagne, and we will all get to watch the hilarious, wretch-inducing consequences.
It was a day straight out of the high summer of 2016. In the afternoon sun, hard Brexit protesters clashed with Remainers outside the gates of Downing Street. Viewed from afar, it looked like serious numbers of private security had been hired to keep them apart. But they turned out merely to be a large group of primary school children in hi-viz tabards, inspecting the poppy wreaths at the cenotaph. Was it for this the clay grew tall?
Jeremy Corbyn was there, at Prime Minister’s Questions, doing his level best to pick apart the prime minister’s Brexit deal, even though, if a leaked briefing from the EU’s negotiator Sabine Weyand is to be believed, it will keeps the UK in the customs union in perpetuity, precisely the kind of Brexit deal Corbyn said he “would gladly support” at the end of his party conference speech last month.
Even Tony Blair popped up with a brief cameo, giving a speech calling for a second referendum. He did that back then, too, if you recall, when the wild waters of Brexit were allayed for the publication of the Chilcot Report, then they surged suddenly back.
At one point, at the despatch box of the House of Commons, a junior housing minister by the name of Nick Hurd, announced Theresa May’s “press statement” had been cancelled. Had the microphone really stood guard for nothing? No, it turned out, two minutes later the “press statement” was back on. Still, just for those short moments, Theresa May’s attempts to get her Brexit deal first past the cabinet and then past the House of Commons had failed even before she’d failed to get it past a solitary mic stand outside her own front door.
If they do topple Theresa May in the coming days, that too will come with a wondrous sense of deja vu. The Hard Brexiteers want rid of her. The Second Referendum Crowd will get rid of her if they think it will get them their prize.
That’s the sort of wide coalition of bitter enemies that might, in recent years gone by, win you a referendum on something like, say, membership of the European Union, but would stop well short of giving you even the tiniest clue about what to do next.
That would be a cure that’s infinitely worse than the disease. Smashing everything up for the sake of it, then looking to someone else to sort it all out. You might, even, call it a crisis. Couldn’t happen, could it? Not again?
The Independent has launched its #FinalSay campaign to demand that voters are given a voice on the final Brexit deal.
Sign our petition here
