ANY time Theresa May has been interviewed on the TV this week, she’s been determined to be jolly. She looks like someone who’s seen smiling in a book, and thinks it might be a good idea to copy it in order to reassure an increasingly panicky country which sees the Brexit cliff edge approaching rapidly.

Somewhere in an alternate universe, there’s a robotic life form that’s learning how to smile in order to infiltrate and destroy human civilisation.

The Theresabot was restored to factory settings because her learning algorithms were unable to distinguish between a sympathetic smile and the look you give when you open a fridge that’s been left unplugged for a month. There are unpleasant and malignant life forms lurking within, some of which answer to the names of Boris, Jacob, and Liam.

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In her interviews, the Prime Minister gives full display to a rictus grin that’s one step short of a walking corpse on a zombie TV show. At best she manages to look like a primary school teacher who gave five-year-olds fireworks to play with and they ended up burning the school down.

Now she’s making a bad fist of faking cheerfulness as she tries to persuade the angry parents that the entire episode has been a valuable learning experience.

Yesterday, she was in Florence, the home of Machiavelli, no doubt hoping to pick up some tips on dealing with the Cabinet.

May reasoned that by going to Italy she could build some bridges with her opponents, but no-one from the EU Commission or the EU negotiating team was in attendance even though chief EU negotiator Michel Barnier was in the same country the day before.

May refused to attend a public meeting in the EU Parliament last week so the EU is not disposed to schlepp to Florence to hear Theresa’s platitudes. Anyway, they have Twitter and the internet and can access Boris Johnson’s reaction online and in the pages of the British press.

The Prime Minister’s speech was a last desperate attempt to put a good sheen on the calamitous farce that is Brexit.

It might have been Florence and the May Sheen, but no-one was buying her broken record.

The only people who were in attendance were UK Cabinet ministers, so at least she will still be reaching out to her opponents. Although to be fair, Boris is back onside again, having agreed not to bury the hatchet in Theresa’s back, at least not for the time being. Cabinet unity was signalled to the watching world, or rather the watching UK press because no-one else cares, by Boris and Philip Hammond walking out of the Cabinet meeting together as though they were besties. It was as spontaneous as an episode of the Kardashians. It won’t last. There are insects with no mouth parts that have longer life expectancy than May’s newly found Cabinet unity.

May hopes that this speech can unblock the Brexit talks. It’s the political equivalent of Toilet Duck and goes a long way toward explaining why they’ve all been looking so flushed this week. The talks are currently as lifeless as May’s smile. Perhaps an offer of €20 billion, a transitional period, and a pinky promise to be nice to EU citizens will placate the EU.

It’s just a shame that none of the UK’s position papers had that effect. The only position the EU saw was the one where the UK’s head was firmly up its backside.

May pleaded with the EU to show some creativity and imagination. It’s up to both the EU and the UK to make a success of Brexit, she said. The EU thought to itself, there’s no amount of creativity that can make anyone imagine that the British Government is halfway competent.

And anyway, it’s not up to the EU to help the UK make a success of Brexit. The only obligation the EU has is to protect itself and EU citizens from the consequences of British idiocy. This is Britain’s mess. Britain can fix it.

Barnier asked this week why there was still such uncertainty about the UK’s position, uncertainty which May’s speech will do little to clarify. It’s because the Tories are far more interested in their own internal feuds than they are in doing what’s right for the country, and they only triggered Article 50 in the first place in order to improve their position in the English local councilelections.

Everything is subordinate to Conservative politicians jockeying for position. Brexit will only be clarified once the last Conservative standing has knifed the second-last standing in the back.

But as the May herself said during her disastrous election campaign, nothing has changed. Brexit remains as ill thought out and self-harming as ever. The EU is as unimpressed as ever. The Tory Cabinet remains as united as a sack of ferrets.

Scotland is still standing on the sidelines being ignored and patronised. No amount of pleading for an imaginative Brexit is going to change that reality. Let’s imagine independence instead.