See if you can spot a pattern.

When Theresa May calls an election and loses the Tory majority, her two political advisers are blamed — and sacked.

When the Prime Minister’s Brexit deal fails to deliver her impossible red lines, Downing Street offers up the head of civil servant Olly Robbins.

When members of the Cabinet openly defy their boss and she’s too weak to fire them, it’s her hard-working chief of staff, Gavin Barwell, who gets the black spot.

Now, when Mrs May is unable twice to get a majority for that deal, it’s the Speaker who’s in the firing line because he won’t bend the rules to let her try and fail for a third time.

Conservatives insist that people should take responsibility for their actions — unless they happen to be their prime ministers. It’s pathetic.

In private, senior ministers have barely a good word to say about Mrs May; in public, they cast around for scapegoats and excuses.

Her premiership has foundered not because she has been ill-advised but because she has failed.

Tory MPs all know it but most lack the courage to do anything about it. Now they may have no other option. Her deal is dead. It was killed by Boris Johnson not John Bercow .

Mrs May’s claim that she could negotiate a better one with the EU has been exposed. It was her own Attorney General who exposed the vacuity of the concessions she trumpeted.

Her ability to reach out across the party divide to find a majority for a new approach is non-existent.

It is not the Ministers she appointed but the Tory backbenchers she fired who are today meeting with Jeremy Corbyn to find a compromise.

She would perhaps prefer now for Britain to leave the EU next week without a deal, so that at least her legacy was that Brexit meant Brexit. But Parliament has moved to stop her doing that.

All she has left to offer is the one thing she said she would never do: delay Britain’s departure beyond March 29, 2019, the date she manufactured for a press release for her first party conference way back in 2016.

Curious alliance

But delay for how long?

Last week, Mrs May said it should be a “technical delay” of no more than three months, to the end of either May or June, to implement her deal.

Since there is no deal there is no one in Brussels or Westminster who thinks that will achieve anything, other than prolonging the life of the May premiership.

That’s why a curious alliance is emerging. The hardliners of the ERG are coming round to the merits of a lengthy delay.

As one former Cabinet minister, David Jones, says today, he’d “be considerably happier with a long extension” than with entering the transition and backstop currently on the table.

Essentially, the hard Brexiteers want to press rewind and start the negotiations again, knowing that they’re best conducted while Britain is still in the room, and they’re confident that this time they can get a true believer into Number 10 to lead the charge.

Those who want to reverse Brexit with a second referendum also seek a delay. They know there isn’t enough support for a new poll right now, thanks to the obstruction of the Labour leader — which is why, in a farcical twist, the People’s Vote campaign recommended that MPs should not back a people’s vote last week.

A long delay would give a chance for minds to change and momentum to build. The European Union would probably grant a short stay of execution if asked at the Council later this week but Brussels is also coming to think, with good reason, that anything less than a long delay of 21 months won’t achieve anything.

European Council President Donald Tusk said last week he would “appeal” to the rest of the EU “to be open to a long extension” so the UK could “rethink its Brexit strategy”. We know President Macron agrees.

So who is the big loser if a departure date is put back? Mrs May. For there really then will be no reason for her to remain in office.

She’s run out of ideas, authority and people around her to blame. She can use party rules to cling on until December but a “strike” by some of her MPs (refusing to back her Government) would quickly shorten that.

The political logic is simple: the longer Brexit is delayed, the sooner she has to go.