First, some good news. Theresa May is consulting party leaders and talking to MPs about the next steps on Brexit. About time too, though it is all frighteningly late. Now, the bad news. She isn’t doing the consulting properly. She is using the process to trade partisan attacks with Jeremy Corbyn rather than to start solving problems. It feels like a stunt. Such irresponsibility on a subject of such magnitude threatens the country. It must change.

On Wednesday evening, and again on Thursday, the prime minister held meetings with a variety of politicians. She was said to be in listening mode. So she should be. But there was little sense – in an invite list that stretched from the anti-European Tory right and the DUP to pro-Europeans in the opposition parties – that this was a process which recognised that the politics of Brexit crossed a watershed on Tuesday night when Mrs May’s deal was so humiliatingly defeated.

The first problem is that Mrs May is in denial about what actually happened on Tuesday. She was trounced. She was around 120 votes short of a Commons majority. So she needs to win over at least 120 MPs. She won’t do that by trying to chisel the odd vote out of the leaver right with marginal concessions. That’s what she tried in December and again this week. It was a doomed quest. It still is. She will only get 120 votes by engaging with other parties and agreeing to Brexit policy compromises.

The second problem is that this is a minimalist exercise conducted entirely on Mrs May’s pre-existing terms. Inviting MPs to discuss the crisis is fine. But this crisis requires a trust-based process. It needs planning and structure – and some privacy for negotiation. It should be a series of reciprocal conversations, with proposals on the table, followed by considered responses on both sides. Whether she likes it or not, Mrs May is in a political horse trade. Instead she is hurrying through multiple meetings before launching her plan B on Monday. This way of cobbling things together at the last minute has let her down in the past. It seems very likely to do so again next week. This time, though, the country’s future is at stake, not just hers.

The third problem is that time is running out. There are only 10 weeks to go before a no-deal crash-out on 29 March. There is much to solve and a lot to legislate. The EU also has to agree to any new approach. Though Mrs May will unveil plan B on Monday, the debate on it will not be until 29 January. By then, 10 weeks will nearly have shrunk to eight. The suspicion is that Mrs May is still trying to run down the clock. She did it in December when she postponed the meaningful vote. Now she seems to be doing it again.

This is not just dangerous but duplicitous. It implies she is still politically focused on the leavers sitting behind her for those missing 120 votes when she should be looking across the Commons for them. Her whole strategy, both on the clock and on talking to opposition MPs, appears to be to use the prospect of no-deal to scare MPs into the government fold and keep her party together. This is the strategy that failed so conclusively on Tuesday. Mrs May needs to learn from her mistakes, not to repeat them – a warning that applies in spades to any reckless thoughts she may be harbouring of calling an early election.

If a thing is worth doing – and preventing a no-deal Brexit is certainly that – then it is worth doing properly. Even now, this means measured but innovative thinking, not quick fixes. The indispensable precondition of this is time. That is why the first thing that opposition leaders and MPs of all parties should press for, on Monday, is to extend the article 50 process, with the EU-27’s agreement, for a period of several months. The purpose would not be to drag the process out. It would be to give MPs and Mrs May the necessary space to reach a reasoned solution to the impasse if they can, without the threat of an imminent crash-out from the EU. It would also enable the search for a solution to go beyond parliament, with the inclusion of the citizens’ assembly that could help to deepen the democratic credibility of what in any event will be a controversial outcome. Extending article 50 is the necessary foundation of a collective national effort to save Britain from an approach to Brexit that, since Tuesday, is now dead and buried.