The only person missing was Prince Edward. Brexit has now turned Westminster into the Crystal Maze on crystal meth. A looking-glass world where any truth has a half-life measured in milliseconds, where normal rules no longer apply and every MP is desperate to play the joker. The best the rest of us can hope for is to wake up to find we had been dropped into the ninth series of Dallas and that the last few years have just been a bad dream. Imagine how good that would feel.

This was the day when the pupils chose to put their own school in special measures because they had lost faith in their teachers. When parliament sought to take back control of parliament. Precisely the form of taking back control the government had always insisted the country didn’t have in mind when it had voted to take back control. But then the government now barely has control over its bowels as everything it touches turns to shit. There is no area of public life it hasn’t found a way to do badly.

First though, we went through the formalities of prime minister’s questions. A formality not just because Theresa May is Leader in Name Only but because Oliver Letwin was the de facto prime minister for the day. For Lino, it seemed like something of a release.

Now that even she seems to have realised she has reached the endgame of her time in office, she appeared almost demob happy, in as much as someone whose automated language skills barely extend to meaningful sentences can do. She still insisted she had no intention of listening to anyone but herself, but made no effort to deny her sell-by date was near. The last sign of artificial intelligence in a Maybot is an awareness of inbuilt obsolescence.

The school’s new timetable didn’t get off to the most promising of starts. After Letwin had apologetically read out the lessons for the day – he does everything apologetically, even on rare occasions like this when he has nothing to apologise for – Jacob Rees-Mogg merely used the time to debate the merits of different public schools. The UK’s biggest constitutional crisis reduced to a spat between Eton and Winchester over Tudor history. Beyond pathos.

The Grand Wizard of Mogg has always resembled a boy in a suit. Now he’s just a homunculus trapped inside a boy’s body, mewling at the moon to distract everyone from his own sense of entitled inadequacy and profound misjudgment, and unable to even own that it was partly down to him that the government had temporarily lost control of Commons’ business. If nanny had been around, he’d have been sent to the naughty step. For life.

Lino wasn’t quite done, however. There was still time for another unnecessary act of self-harm as she whipped her party to vote down the business of the house that had been agreed only two days previously. She punched the air as she crashed to yet another defeat. Losing has become an obsessive compulsive disorder. Failure is her defining feature, the only thing at which she indisputably excels. With any luck, she’d lose again providing John Bercow didn’t stop her from bringing the meaningful vote for a third time and the Democratic Unionist party didn’t do something stupid like saying it would vote for her deal after all.

But Lino needed back-up, a get-out clause. So she headed off to the 1922 Committee to deliver the coup de grace, the sacrificial self-immolation. She knew she was useless, she told the Tory backbenchers. She had always been hopeless. And now was the time for everyone to acknowledge they too thought she was rubbish by getting behind her deal that they all thought was terrible. If they did that, she’d promise to resign sometime over the summer. She wasn’t entirely clear on dates, but then she’s seldom clear on anything. All she cared about was that she’d created the ultimate lose-lose situation, both for herself and the country. She would go down in history as the worst ever prime minister. So far. The ideal outcome.

Boris Johnson tried to look sombre as he left the 1922 Committee but he couldn’t conceal a smirk. Everything was working out just fine. Who cared if the public reckoned him to be a man of no principles? He’d never pretended to be anything but a self-interested careerist. Brexit had only ever been a means to an end. He could live with vassalage if necessary. Having blown it once back in 2016, he now had another shot at the top job. His face crumpled just a little as he belatedly realised he’d be struggling for support among fellow Tory MPs who did have scruples. Hopefully, there wouldn’t be too many of them. And a little Latin would impress the rest.

What followed was yet more clusterfuckery. The ERG split, the splitters split from the splitters and then the hardcore Spartans threatened to bulldoze parliament in the name of democracy. Just before 9pm the shit really hit the fan when the DUP found there was no deal to which they could say yes. No retreat, baby, no surrender. Lino’s deal was as good as dead and she’d made the ultimate futile gesture.

As so often we ended up by knowing less than when we had started. Friday had been cleared for a third meaningful vote but no one knew if it would now even take place. Just how much more of a punishment beating was Lino willing to take. She couldn’t even organise her own departure. The only upside was the distress on Boris’s face. His venality had been all in vain. The pneumatic huckster had just slashed his own spare tyres.

The quantum Brexit had become ever more relative. And parliament was still left wondering quite what it had taken back control of as it had contrived to vote against everything. Bollocks to everything. The will of the people was to remain indefinitely in a tenth circle of hell. We were supposed to be leaving the EU in two days’ time. Time for the Four Pot Plants.