The doors remained shut for a good while as the assembled journalists waited for Theresa May’s press conference on Thursday evening. I was fixated. Was she going to resign? Was she just going to kick down the door? Was she going to dance in with her strange jerking for fun? Was she going to come in crying, with mascara streaking down her face, swigging a bottle of gin and telling everyone that most of her party were, in John Major’s apposite words, a bunch of “bastards”? No. She was eerily calm and gave a speech that no one understood had ended as it had no climax. Then questions. Some blather about cricket and off she went presumably to yet another meeting where everyone hates her. She had been in such meetings for days now. She stood in the Commons ploughing over rough terrain like a tank. There was no support from her own side but God she still managed to make it all sound boring.

How does she continue to get up in the mornings and face this? Neither power nor money seem to motivate her. Not even ideology. It must be duty. But to whom?

She wanders lonely as a cloud, although it is hard to imagine her heart ever filling with pleasure as among the daffodils. I had lunch with her years ago and it was a pointless exercise. She seemed devoid of joy. There was no give. Maybe she just didn’t like me (I know that is hard to believe) but it seems she is like that with everyone. The polite word is inscrutable. But there are other words too now: all of them from the men who surround her to do her down. She is inadequate, incapable, a sellout. Do any of them have the cojones to challenge her? Do they think they would do so much better?

Of course they think that. Yet these are the men who were tasked with negotiating Brexit but spectacularly failed. David Davis couldn’t be bothered to read the briefing notes. Michael Gove the anti-expert Jack of all trades, master of slime. Jacob Rees-Mogg, always in character as the fake languid patrician who wants the most extreme form of Brexit, yet has quietly moved his money to Ireland. Boris Johnson, the lying narcissist who has disgraced himself too many times for any amount of Latinate waffle to convince us any more. Other thugs lurk: Steve Baker and Gavin Williamson both less trustworthy than the average estate agent.

This unseemly combo may well unseat the PM, and Theresa may at last be free to run through fields of wheat, do some Nordic walking with her husband and read copies of Elle Deco. It’s hard to imagine that now, because this woman has so little hinterland it’s hard to see a heartland.

This is why the psychology on display disturbs me. I am amazed by her tenacity but her refusal to display any emotion in public also conveys a form of madness. I’m not going into the detail, or the rights and wrongs of Brexit. I know many of us remain bored, confused and bamboozled by these complex negotiations. People who are passionate on both sides love an obscure treaty, but most of us just want it to end. But we are living in a state of collective delusion. Brexit is largely about fantasy: the fantasy that we can walk away and be a sovereign nation. Or the fantasy we could go back to how it was before the referendum. The fantasy that Jeremy Corbyn has an ace up his sleeve and will deliver the Brexit he has also supported, as well as creating socialism on our golden shores. Or the fantasy that another vote will make all the bad things go away. Scotland figures little in it. And Ireland … where is that exactly? This is a collective breakdown of English identity. We are in a period of mass delusion. May is pushing something that makes no one happy but at least her hollowed-out pragmatism is vaguely more in touch with reality than the plotters.

Even the Daily Mail sees it. She is trying to deliver something she doesn’t believe in because she knows it is something impossible. She toured the studios on Friday morning revealing small details about herself. She relies on insulin from Denmark and stress affects her blood sugar levels as a diabetic.

So on she ploughs: awkward, lonely, exhausted, hopeless, deluded and therefore a perfect representative for the state of our national politics.

And in this sense, if she just once let go, if she once shed tears in public, if she once exhibited an emotion beyond battling through, if she once answered a question, if she chose to play human – just for a day – we would all breathe a sigh of relief. Why? Because right now she is part of a delusion; that both she and therefore this country are powerful and in control when we see and feel the power ebbing away.

Theresa May is not a lion leading donkeys. She is just an extremely tired donkey surrounded by reptiles. This is called pragmatism but it is in fact lunacy. Let her rest.

• Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist