First, here’s the good news on Brexit. The Malthouse Compromise is dead. Britain has signed a post-Brexit free trade agreement with Fiji and Papua New Guinea. The irritating phrase “meaningful vote” has lost all meaning. Prime Minister Theresa May, who increasingly resembles one of those characters that just won’t die in a TV series, is running out of time to pop up again with her so-called “deal.”

The bad news is we’re only in Act IV, if that. This British disaster has legs.

It’s chaos out there with two weeks to go until the March 29 deadline for Britain to leave the European Union. This is what happens when English public school boys, nostalgic for Empire, dream up a scheme for the resurrection of British glory based on foisting every little-England frustration on their neighbors across the Channel who started or lost the war.

Delusion is the mother of debacle. Jon Snow, the Channel 4 presenter, lost it with the health secretary Matt Hancock as he tried to express some pious hope. Snow pronounced Britain “completely asunder.” He said that “nobody in the country knows what’s going on,” and that Hancock knew “nothing.”

His verdict on Britain after a week of parliamentary debate that went some way toward indicating what Britain doesn’t want but offered no clue as to what Britain does want: “We are a laughingstock.”