For any other person, the EU council meeting would have been shit or bust. But given that Theresa May has long since treated the last-chance saloon as a drop-in centre for the soon-to-be homeless, we are now well beyond that. The Leader in Name Only has taken herself to the realms of shit and bust. A space-time continuum where she has failed upwards and upwards to the point where there are no good solutions on offer in any imagined universe. She is the kamikaze pilot doomed to crash her plane into the sea over and over again for all eternity.

Lino had started the day in reasonably good spirits. For once, she had managed to unite the whole country. The TUC and the CBI had released a joint statement saying she was useless. Both Labour and Tory MPs had been so thoroughly pissed off by her Bob Geldof “Give me your fucking votes” telethon appeal that they were even more likely to reject her deal than they had been before she had opened her mouth. Every one of her cabinet ministers was plotting to get rid of her. No one anywhere had a good word to say about her. In an act of misplaced martyrdom, Lino had brought a nation together. If this was her being on their side, they’d hate to see what she could do when she was against them.

Having left Gavin “Private Pike” Williamson in charge of activating the nuclear bunker under No 10 – on reflection, not the safest pair of hands for an apocalypse but needs must – Lino had headed off to Brussels for her latest final showdown. On arrival, she had appeared characteristically shifty when she was asked by reporters what she was going to say to the EU. Plan? Why were people expecting her to have a plan? That was the kind of question her cabinet kept asking her. She hopped nervously from one foot to the other, telling the cameras she was determined to be determined before beetling off mid-sentence.

That turned out to be pretty much a rehearsal for her meeting with the 27 EU leaders. A punishment beating for all concerned in which Lino managed to talk for 90 minutes but say almost nothing. Five minutes with May has been enough to have most people screaming for heavy medication. Munch had had it easy. Time and again, Lino was asked what she would do if she failed to get her deal through at the third attempt and each time she stared at the floor. The sound of one brain cell desperately seeking out another. It’s the closest to human contact she gets these days.

Evasion and deceit are now hot-wired into her basic circuitry. Lino can no longer remember what she has said to whom. Or even if it matters. No self left to be divided. In January she had told parliament the UK hadn’t voted for a no-deal Brexit. Now it was her default option. Last week she had promised to seek a long extension, now she had her heart set on a short one. Her battery life is near zero. Words, language and meaning have all collapsed in on each other. Everything is nothing. She is now almost inchoate. Her existence reduced to minute-by-minute survival. Am I alive? Am I still prime minister? The rest is silence.

As so often, Lino’s inability to articulate her basic needs – food, water, deal, no deal, death – left the EU in a state of thinly disguised fury and their discussions stretched well past the point where both the double act of Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk and May were supposed to give their press conferences on what had or hadn’t been agreed. Shortly before midnight, white smoke emerged. A deal had been offered that Lino was obliged to take. Her 90 minutes of tough talking to the EU had resulted in an offer considerably less than she had demanded. She has a way with words. Juncker and Tusk merely looked like indulgent parents who had prevented a crisis for a few more weeks at least. And would do so again if necessary. Whatever it took for the UK parliament to get its act together. Until the very end of time.

Twenty minutes later, Lino blinked her way into a brightly lit upstair room to give a press conference of her own. She appeared to have taken part in slightly different negotiations. For her the main sticking point had been getting the EU to agree to the Stormont Lock that no one had been talking about and would infuriate the ERG. As for the extension, 22 May and 12 April were pretty much the same as 30 June.

Besides, she was still going to get her deal through parliament because parliament would bloody well do what she wanted though obviously she respected the views of MPs who disagree with her. Everything in her body language suggested the opposite. She just can’t do contrition. Asked what she would do if her deal was voted down, Lino retreated into a random series of zeros that could mean anything and nothing. It was a strange, semi-detached performance of a prime minister struggling to convince herself she was still in charge.

Bonjour tristesse. Taking back control had come down to handing back control to the only grownups left in the room. A woman and a country humiliated both by a refusal to accept reality and by the thrilling rush of self-harm. Whether her deal eventually went through or not, her time was up. She had broken herself and her party. And in the process she had taken the country down with her.

