“Nothing has changed, nothing has changed,” a fragile Theresa May snapped during her statement on the Nato summit, after Labour’s Stephen Kinnock had observed she had effectively ripped up her own Chequers white paper by accepting the wrecking amendments to her customs bill that had been tabled by the hardline Brexiters of the European Reform Group.

She was right. Nothing had changed. Yet again, when faced with a challenge to her authority from the right wing of her party, she had given way. May is a psyche in near total collapse. Someone whose only remaining function is to try to do whatever it takes get through to the end of each day in the hope that tomorrow never comes. A prime minister in name only.

That thought was uppermost in Anna Soubry’s mind when she opened the debate on the third reading of the customs bill. Who was running the country, she asked? Theresa May or Jacob Rees-Mogg? The answer was even more terrifying than the question. The reality is that no one appears to be running the country. At a time when the UK is in the grip of a political and existential crisis, the government is no more than flotsam drifting aimlessly between competing tides of reality and ideology.

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Soubry was damning of her ERG colleagues on the Tory benches and forensic in her dismantling of their arguments, accusing them of putting hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk when they were protected by gold-plated pensions and private incomes. This predictably drew return blue-on-blue fire from the ERG cabal of Edward Leigh, Christopher “Upskirting” Chope, David Davis, Steve Baker, Priti Patel and Bernard Jenkin who were huddled together near the back of the chamber. A true confederacy of dunces. Six MPs in search of a brain cell.

“You ain’t no Margaret Thatcher,” leered Leigh in, what was for him, one of his more intelligent contributions to parliamentary life. Even his colleagues appeared embarrassed by that. All but Jenkin, who was hellbent on seeing how high he could raise the stupidity bar. Having earlier in the day declared that business was far too interested in making money, he now suggested that the way to reconcile just-in-time production with longer border checks was to make sure that lorries set out from the EU several days earlier than they currently did. That way it wouldn’t matter if they got held up. If he wasn’t already an MP, Jenkin would be hard pushed to get a job.

Often in the past, Soubry has been more talk than action. She labours under the misapprehension that it’s possible to fight the ideology of a hard Brexit with appeals to reason. So when she agreed to withdraw her own amendment to remain in the customs union to show willing, the Brexiters just sniggered at the back. They thought that yet again she and the other remainers were ineffectual if noisy cheerleaders. This time though, they appeared to have found some steel. The remainer rebels had finally learned how to rebel. For the government, it was another unnecessary self-inflicted wound. A total clusterfuck.

Moments later, Davis stood up to make his first contribution in the house since his resignation last week. He opened by saying he wasn’t going to make a Geoffrey Howe-style resignation speech rubbishing the prime minister. Rather he wanted to go out of his way to offer an olive branch. Now that May had officially abandoned her Chequers agreement there was nothing to stop her reappointing him as Brexit secretary. Let bygones be bygones. If May could pretend that nothing had happened – or indeed changed – then so could he. The year of magical thinking.

What Davis hadn’t banked on was his own intellect. Or lack of it. In making a pitch for wisdom, he unwittingly proved exactly why he had always been so unsuited to being in office. Not so much gravitas, as levitas. The best way to increase world trade was to trash our trade with the EU. We needed lorries to be stacked up outside Dover. Hard borders? No problem. Best of all, we were bound to get a great trade deal because as the other EU countries couldn’t speak English they wouldn’t be able to understand when we were negotiating in English. Really.

He was heard in near silence by MPs on both sides of the house. Under the circumstances it was the kindest response. Davis is now a stranger not just to government but also to intelligent life.

Yet again nothing had changed.