By Beth Rigby, deputy political editor

With just nine days to go before Britain is due to leave the EU, the prime minister still doesn't know if her Brexit deal will pass; will Brussels allow the UK to delay Brexit? Will we leave with no deal? What an absolute shambles.



The British public voted in June 2016 to leave the EU by a margin of 52% to 48%. The prime minister gave them a hard leaving date - 29 March 2019 - nine months later.

In the past two years, Theresa May repeated that promise over 100 times and yet here we are, nearly three years on from the referendum contemplating a Brexit delay.



The entire political class is tired, angry, frustrated and at loggerheads as to where to go next.

I bumped into one senior protagonist in the Tory Brexit wars on Tuesday and asked whether he, like many around SW1, had Brexit fatigue.

Image: The PM has lacked 'imagination, flexibility and flair'

"I'm beyond fatigue. Every time I spend two weeks on [Brexit], I want to give up, retire, and take myself off to a mountain top and go for a long walk."



He could be speaking for the nation, looking on aghast at the hash parliamentarians of all hues are making of Brexit.



We have a prime minister behaving like a "battering ram", still trying to drive her deal through parliament, in the face of consistent opposition from her parliamentary party and the DUP since July last year.


They have been as consistent in their opposition as she has been in her obdurateness. This is a prime minister who has lacked the imagination, flexibility, flair or clubbability to find a way through.

Beneath her sits a discontented and unruly cabinet, which will neither obey their prime minister nor issue her marching orders.

The leaks from private discussions come thick and fast these days.

Cabinet government is failing but the prime minister lacks the authority to do anything about it. Mutiny runs from her cabinet table through to the green benches. She is in government but her party is now just about ungovernable.

Image: The public aren't keen on the prospect of another referendum, according to polls

Opposite we have a Labour leader making the right noises on compromise, all the while sitting on his hands, waiting for the government to implode.

Jeremy Corbyn doesn't seem to strongly want either a single market Brexit or a second referendum.

He wants a general election - even if the public don't much relish the prospect of a fourth national vote in five years (the fifth for Scottish voters).

Then there are the MPs who are demanding a re-run of the 2016 referendum, apparently impervious to all the polling that suggests the public don't want that much either.

Some 56% of Britons were opposed to another public vote on whether we should leave the EU in January, compared with 44% who supported the proposal, according to a Sky Data poll.

"Bregret" - despite the mayhem of recent months - is not on the rise.

As they fight like ferrets in a sack, voters look on - actually I suspect many are switching off in exasperation or despair - at the collective failure of our political class and political leaders to resolve this crisis.

Politicians can opine about whether former prime minister David Cameron was right or wrong to hold a referendum on Britain's membership of the EU. But what they cannot deny is that the decision was farmed out to the public and they voted to leave.

There is a big chunk of the population that believes it is incumbent on our political class to honour that plebiscite. That result and those voters are at odds with an overwhelmingly Remain parliament, and therein lies the tussle between representative and direct democracy.

Mrs May will in all likelihood ask Brussels for a short delay to Brexit until June 30 to give her one more chance to get her exit agreement through the House of Commons next week.

But she is also expected to ask for a longer delay if no agreement can be reached in the little time we have left.

This is undoubtedly a nuclear option given that Britain would probably then be required to take part in the European Parliament elections in May. That would most likely provoke Brexiteers to press the destruct button on her leadership - and even her government.

Just a week ago, senior government figures were pushing back hard on the prospect of having to contest the EU elections.

Never before in my lifetime has the political class seemed so cut adrift from the people they are there to serve

Tonight the de facto deputy prime minister, David Lidington, is due to host a party for outgoing Conservative MEPs to celebrate their redundancies.

That he suddenly finds himself holding such an event on the very day Britain asks Brussels for a delay is the perfect vignette of how chaotic Brexit has become.

That Britain finds itself in this situation just nine days from our EU exit date is undoubtedly an abject failure of our political class. The public have every right to feel utterly fed up and disillusioned with those MPs who voted in favour of holding the referendum in the first place.

You might find some consolation in the prospect of exacting revenge on your political representatives in upcoming local - and perhaps even European Parliament - elections in May.

But my biggest fear is that what will stem from this mess is apathy from an already sceptical electorate, who will seize on a delay to Brexit as proof the Westminster elite don't respect the votes they cast.

Never before in my lifetime has the political class seemed so cut adrift from the people they are there to serve.

Sky Views is a series of comment pieces by Sky News editors and correspondents, published every morning.

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