Finally. Theresa May had found a vote she could win. A narrow two-vote victory. A largely pyrrhic victory, as the government had won on a motion to extend article 50 it had never actually wanted to put to the house in the first place. Even when the Leader In Name Only is winning, she still contrives to lose. Another crank of the pathos handle. The government still just about had control of the parliamentary timetable. For a few more days at least.

Not that Lino took any pleasure in the result. No smile escaped her lips, no signifier of relief. Just a hunched figure, lost in a near catatonic state. She clearly hates her life almost as much as she hates many of her colleagues. Hating is one of the few things she does well. The body language between her and Philip Hammond was of a couple who had long since realised there had never been two of them in this relationship. She left long before the final result was declared.

With Lino’s voice on either life support or a damage limitation exercise – take your pick – it had been left to the Cabinet Office minister, David Lidington, to open the latest Brexit debate the government had been hoping to avoid. He looked like a man who knew he had drawn the short straw.

Another day of Brexit votes: what they mean and what comes next Read more

Lidington is usually one of the cabinet’s more able performers. He knows his brief and, unlike many of his replicant colleagues whose mere presence makes the flesh crawl, he has a basic humanity and integrity to which even opposition MPs readily respond. Yet he too has been corroded by Brexit. Not so much in his fundamental honesty, but in his self-doubt.

His self confidence is shot, anxiety is now lined in his face and he has developed a nervous tic. Not as pronounced as Chris Grayling’s, but similar. Perhaps it’s contagious, the inevitable legacy of spending too much time close to ministers who don’t know what they are doing and have no authority. A government whose only doctrine is to fail. Fail again. Fail better. Samuel Beckett’s time has come.

Lidington hopped from side to side nervously, like someone who had mistakenly imagined that only 12 double espressos could get him through his impending ordeal. He began by trying to lay out the government’s position. A near impossible task when it changes by the hour. If Lino was in any position to enforce this, then we’d now have reached the point where ministers could face show trials for thought crimes for failing to understand that she no longer believed what she had believed in the morning.

Um, er ... As far as he knew, what the government currently thought was that if the Brexit deal was passed then the UK would ask for a short extension to the article 50 process. And if it wasn’t then we would have to ask for a longer one. Which wouldn’t be good as we might have to spend £16m on European elections. Rather less than Failing Grayling manages to waste in an average morning.

Predictably there were countless interventions, with MPs quick to observe they were being asked to forget the government had previously said it would never ask for an extension because it would never be granted and it was only the prime minister’s own incompetence that had led to this current request – which now apparently would be granted. Hilary Benn and Oliver Letwin both made the very obvious case that it was clearly time for parliament to start thinking about what it did want. Lidington didn’t seem to think that a good idea at all.

Other contributions were rather less illuminating. Tory Edward Leigh wondered if the best way out of the backstop might be to rip up all our treaties and declare war on Brussels. Mark Francois announced that he’d just been to the gents and wanted to know if anything had happened that he’d missed. There was. The last five years. One feels for his next of kin.

The uncertainty was catching. Keir Starmer has generally been playing a blinder, but he too now looked like someone operating on a faulty autopilot. Partly through fatigue, but mostly because he was being asked to defend the indefensible. If it was hard enough trying to convince the house it could get a completely new deal agreed with the EU inside three months, it was a near impossibility to sound convincing when he said that yesterday would have been a good day for a second referendum, tomorrow would be a good day for a second referendum, but today wasn’t. He sat down, his head bowed with embarrassment. A bad day at the office.

Day 993 in the Big Brexit House. The inmates had voted for something, but nobody was quite sure what. We were now well into an infinitesimally small 12th dimension. A near airless vacuum, devoid of intelligent life. Somehow all but 15 Tories, along with six Labour leavers, had managed to convince themselves that they didn’t need to take back the control they had once voted to take back. They were happy to be guided by a prime minister who clearly didn’t know what she was doing. No one knew anything. Least of all Lino. In the final vote, the Brexit secretary, Stephen Barclay, who had summed up the debate for the government turned out to vote against the government. The cabinet now has a collective death wish. A parliament of donkeys led by nematodes. The country went to bed praying there would be no tomorrow. Where’s an asteroid when you need one?