An unfamiliar sound was heard in the Commons. Not the call of a stray rodent, but the voice of Jeremy Corbyn. While there may be some virtue in keeping quiet while your opponent is making mistakes, there comes a time, when the country is visibly falling apart, that some people would quite like to hear from the leader of the opposition. But for much of the past week Corbyn has chosen to keep a low profile. Keep things chilled. It’s a busy time of year on the allotment.

The lack of vocal practice had taken its toll at prime minister’s questions. The Labour leader could barely rasp out a coherent question and appeared completely unaware of the gravity of the situation. It could have been just one of his normal off-the-shelf rants. Still, even if he had found a killer line on the government’s Brexit clusterfuck, there was no chance of getting a straight answer from Theresa May.

For more than two years, the prime minister has spoken Maybot, a very primitive computer language only capable of basic sentences that are more or less grammatical, but still almost totally devoid of meaning. Since she became Leader in Name Only, Lino – hard to nail down, but easy to walk over – she can’t even manage that. Her binary messages into deep space are now just a long series of random noughts. She literally has nothing to offer. More worrying still, her already limited random access memory has totally failed. She now has no recollection of anything she said just days earlier.

All of which made PMQs yet again one of the more excruciating sessions of the week. Time and again she was asked by MPs – the Labour old guard of Ed Miliband, Hilary Benn and Yvette Cooper were out in force – how she could possibly reconcile her decision to ask for a short Brexit extension with her and David Lidington, the Cabinet Office minister, having said that to do so would be reckless in the extreme. And every time, Lino could only look a bit confused and blurt out some random beeps. 000 0 00 00 000000 0.

She was heard in almost total silence. Everyone but Lino seems to know her time is up. She has never had any friends, but now she doesn’t even have any moderately supportive colleagues either among the Tory remainers or leavers. Lino is a woman unloved by everyone. Not least herself.

What once could be passed off as stubbornness – or resilience, if you were feeling generous – has morphed into self-hatred. Her anger at the world expressed through acts of repeated self-harm. She dreams of her legacy, but every day that only becomes more tarnished. Brexit has stripped her of everything. The only person who enjoyed the session was Julian Smith. When the SNP accused Lino of acting in her party’s interest, the chief whip smiled for the first time in months. It was the first time anyone had ever suggested he had been doing a good job.

With the government effectively having collapsed in on itself into a black hole, it was left to Donald Tusk, the president of the European council, to effectively take control of the UK. Not quite what was written on the Brexit tin. Or even the bus. As Lino couldn’t even get her letter to the EU in on time, Tusk delivered his own ultimatum. A short extension on condition of the withdrawal passing. After that, all bets were more or less off. Enough was enough. The EU throwing Lino a lifeline – to make remotely credible her threat that it was her deal or no deal – was just another humiliation.

All of which rendered the emergency Brexit debate more or less pointless. There again, anything featuring Steve Barclay is almost by definition pointless. Everyone had always known he was dim – that’s why he had been given the job – but no one suspected he was actually catatonic. A man fuelled by industrial quantities of barbiturates. Let’s hope he’s stockpiled enough, or he’s going to go horrendous cold turkey if there’s a no-deal Brexit. Barclay doesn’t even have the synaptic connection to understand why everyone in the country is laughing at him for voting against a motion for which he spoke in favour.

There was still time for Corbyn to have a hissy and stomp out of a meeting with the prime minister because Chuka Umunna had also been invited – you can rely on the Labour leader to choose the wrong molehill to die on – before Lino made an unscheduled TV address. Sure enough, she was even late for that. It’s a wonder she can get out of bed by herself.

As so often, when she did find her way to the Downing Street lectern, she didn’t have anything new to add. She began by reminding everyone she had triggered article 50 two years ago and that since then she had managed to make a mess of everything. Schools, hospitals, Brexit. She’d buggered up the lot of them. “People have had enough,” she said. This at least was the truth. Everyone had had enough. Of her. Of her lies. Of her contempt for parliament. Of her clinically insane belief that everyone but her was to blame. Of her dogged determination to take everyone in the country down with her.

Lino concluded by saying she’d see us all on the other side. If there was one.