Eighteen months of ambiguity takes its toll. Makes the culprits thin-skinned, wraith-like.

Not just on Theresa May - who looks plain old miserable these days, squinting at Laura Kuenssberg in the Chinese sunshine, wishing she’d just belt up about bloody Brexit and let her brag instead about some pre-arranged trade deals we’d somehow managed to set up while still labouring under the shackles of European Union oppression.

In the pre-enlightenment age I grew up in, it wasn’t the done thing to make unkind remarks about the physical appearance of a woman, but in today’s spirit of sexual equality I feel the liberation of honesty: It is as though the Sisyphean burden of eternally rolling Brexit up that hill, only to see it roll back down again for all eternity, is about to do her in.

Eighteen months of relentless appeasing, modifying, prevaricating, chanting meaningless mantras like invocations to ward away the evil spirits of reality, has drained her. She looks utterly cream crackered.

And speaking of crackers, we come to Jacob’s. Oh how his mask slipped this week! Rees-Mogg likes to give the impression of being a model of Edwardian civility, but if anyone in the civil service was labouring under any illusions of that, I doubt they are today.

© PA Photos

Hard Brexit’s Haw-Haw bared his teeth as he threw the Treasury number crunchers under the Brexit bus, or at least he tried to, until the premise of his repeated attacks was all exposed as a bare-faced lie.

But mud sticks. That’s what his new mentor Steve Bannon - he of Breitbart fame - will have told him on his recent visit to meet Team Mogg. That’s right - fire-and-fury Bannon is discussing with fire-and-brimstone Rees-Mogg about the dark arts of political messaging. Expect things to turn nastier and nastier from here on in.

I suppose Rees-Mogg did well to hold on to his composure in the face of 18 long months of backsliding on his, and chum Farage’s, vision of Independence Day.

But for a putative chancellor of the exchequer (yes, that’s been mooted too, alongside Boris Johnson as PM and Michael Gove as deputy, the Moe, Larry and Curly of Brexit - stooges of the Daily Mail) it is an interesting tactic, accusing his potential staff of being crooked.

This stuff may be just sharp-end politics for Rees-Mogg, but it stinks and it trickles down onto real people in the real world.

Pia Long, the civilian wife of a civil servant, tweeted to me in regard of Rees-Mogg’s accusations:

“How dare he. My husband works for the Treasury as a government statistician. He is the most dutiful and pedantic person I know and Brexit has aged him by years with worry. Looking at the real data versus political manoeuvring has been incredibly stressful.”

Her sense of outrage is shared, literally - it’s been retweeted and liked more than 8,500 times at the time of writing.

But nevermind the civil service and their innocent families. Spare a thought, instead, for us, the commentariat.

After 18 months we are close to exhausting vocabulary for just how unprecedentedly dreadful this prime ministerial show is.

The reviews have pouring in of late, and five stars they are not. A recent batch, by way of example:

Matthew D’Ancona, in the Guardian: “The stuffed remnant of a once-optimistic prime minister, helpless in the midst of anarchic cacophony. This is government by taxidermy.”

Matthew Parris in the Times: “A terrified, paralysed Prime Minister leads a doubting Government towards she knows not what.”

Marina Hyde in the Guardian: “We are now in a sort of Brexit wild west, where lawless Tories are saying and doing as they please.”

John Crace, also in the Guardian: “Over the last few months the government seems to have come up with a different plan almost on a daily basis. Sometimes more frequently than that.”

If Theresa May were a Broadway musical (as it surely will be before the decade is out) it would have both sold out then shut down in the space of a week.

It is extraordinary to take a step back and consider the narrative arc this prime minister's story has taken - and the level of sheer incompetence we have normalised in this country in these last 18 months.

In any walk of life apart from this, the most important, Theresa May and her entire management team would have been fired by now. There’s not a shareholder on the planet who would tolerate the mismanagement of this country, the inaction, the deviation, the laziness, the internal politics, the deceit.

But normalised or not, there is one relentless reality about to intrude on this surreal state of disunion: Michel Barnier and his clock, which, to everyone’s great consternation, refuses to stop ticking. Somewhat like a bomb, waiting to go off. “Britain has to make a choice,” Barnier smiles, gently, crucifyingly. We are running out of time.

And it was yet another Frenchman who summed up well the crisis both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn today face.

As 17th-century clergyman Jean François Paul de Gondi, cardinal of Retz, wrote: "On ne sort de l'ambiguïté qu'à son détriment [nobody ever gave up a position of ambiguity without paying for it].”

Whichever way she falls this week, whichever choice she makes, Theresa May is about to learn the price.

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