When you haven’t got anything much to say, it’s generally best to keep quiet. But if Theresa May were to stick to that principle then she’d never say anything. Which might be doing everyone else a favour, but isn’t generally considered to be a sound operating tactic for a prime minister.

So every now and again – both to let off steam and to appear in control – May’s random speech generator is put into action. A near meaningless tumble of words that die the moment they are uttered. Each sentence forgotten before it is even completed. An exercise in futility that is every bit as painful for her as her audiences. Being prime minister is an act of masochism for May and sadism for the country.

This time it was the turn of business leaders in Belfast to be strapped to their chairs and drip-fed the prime minister’s patented brand of existential Largactil. She began by observing Northern Ireland and Ireland were actually joined by a land border and that there were roads, fields and hedges nearby. This may have been news to her, but it wasn’t to anyone else in the room and a loud bleep sounded as the transmission was interrupted. Presumably to make sure no one outside the room could hear the audience swearing.

“We’ve come a long way in the past two-and-a-half years,” she continued, the rest of the sentence drowned out by another convenient high-pitched bleep. A long way, as in we’d made next to no progress at all in resolving the Irish border problems. With just over 50 days until the UK was due to crash out of the EU with a no deal that would guarantee a hard border, the government literally had no idea how to avoid a hard border.

But never mind. Love would find a way. No one loved Ireland more than May. No one. Which is why she had gone out of her way not to go there that often and to talk to almost no one other than the Democratic Unionist party for the last couple of years. She then gave a quick resume of recent Irish history, which everyone already knew, before saying she would defend the Good Friday agreement with her life. There would be no hard border. Promise.

She wasn’t going to sell out Ireland with alternative arrangements that didn’t work. Even though she had set up an alternative arrangements working group made up of Owen Paterson and Marcus Fysh, two of the stupidest members of the Tory party, who could be relied on to come up with solutions, involving highly-trained, well-armed badgers and carrier pigeons, that were totally unworkable. But ssssh! Don’t let anyone know that she thought they were morons.

And that was that. Except it wasn’t. May was under instructions to talk for 21 minutes exactly and she had only spoken for seven. So she went back to the beginning and started again. Being on a loop has never bothered the Maybot. Ireland was a country with a border and a troubled history. No one loved Ireland more than she did. She would find a way to avoid a hard border even though she didn’t have a clue how right now. And when she had got to the end for a second time, she repeated herself a third time. When she could get a word in edgeways between the bleeps.

Then came the questions. Here it all got a bit nasty. Having spent so much of the last couple of years trying to appease the DUP and the ERG, it hadn’t occurred to her that the majority of Northern Ireland had voted to remain. But having sucked up the inevitable, they had then gone out of their way to support the backstop arrangements of the withdrawal agreement. Only to find that May had gone out of her way to disown her own deal.

“BLEEP.... Shafted... BLEEP... Why should anyone trust you..? BLEEP” asked one reporter who spoke for most of the country. May looked genuinely confused. She hadn’t been expecting this at all. She stared at the floor and started mumbling. Um... parliament had voted to change the backstop... “It hadn’t BLEEP. It had voted to get BLEEP rid of it,” someone observed. The prime minister pressed on. She was going to change the backstop. Somehow. Somewhere. She’d find a new way of living.

The audience slumped in despair. The chances of May getting a deal that would satisfy the EU and the DUP and ERG were vanishing before their eyes. The border wasn’t so much a maze of roads, fields and hedges. It was a creek. Shit creek. And the government was halfway up it without a paddle.