Theresa May. Not so much just a person anymore, not even just a prime minister, but a fundamental life energy. She is gravity. She is electromagnetism. She is the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, the whistle on the divine wind. When sub atomic particles decide to come together, they do so through her.

The latest moment in her invincibility came at just gone midnight in a dismal neon striplit room in Brussels. There have been a million such moments before, there will be a billion again, but this one, perhaps, was the most important. This was, in Brexit terms, the irreducible instant that lights the way to the end. This was the moment Brexit stepped over a log and saw the hatched velociraptor eggs, and knew at once the wonder of life and the certainty of its own death. It raised its gaze to meet the horizon. Theresa found a way. Theresa found a way.

She always, always, finds a way. But never quite like this. Twenty four hours before, when she’d had absolutely nowhere to turn, yet again, she found a way out by going on television and trying to hypnotise the nation into believing her lies. It hadn’t worked. It had, in fact, done the opposite.

She was in Brussels now, alone and with nothing but her own stunning ineptitude. So what did she do? She found a way to weaponise it. Her own stunning ineptitude, that is. That was what she could use to get her out of this mess – her own crapness. And she did it as well, the full diplomatic dirty protest.

Twenty four hours before, she’d been given an ultimatum by Donald Tusk. You can have an extension to Article 50, he’d said, but only if you get your withdrawal deal through the House of Commons. They had choreographed it together in advance, to apply maximum pressure to MPs to do as they were being told.

But then she’d gone on the TV and gone fully mad, and now here he was, with all the other EU leaders, standing in the same room as her and he realised how stupid he’d been.

He’d hinged the whole bet on her getting her deal through. He was dependent on her not f**king everything up. It was like he’d locked a solitary monkey in a tiny cupboard and given it an hour and half to knock out the completed works of Shakespeare. Theoretically possible, of course, but not altogether likely.

Now she had the upper hand. He’d actually relied on her to get something done. How stupid was he? She knows how useless she is. She’s known for longer than anyone – sixty years and counting. And she had another trick up her sleeve as well.

The whole point of the ultimatum had been to terrify British MPs with the threat of no deal. But here she was in front of him, saying she was fine with no deal. The UK prime minister, having absolutely no problem at all with becoming what has since been described by one of her own MPs as “the first major nation essentially to place sanctions on itself.”

It was the moment the UK went the full Kim Jong. For some decades now, North Korea’s very deliberate foreign policy has been to convince the rest of the world it is entirely mad in the hope everyone will be scared enough to leave it alone. And it’s worked, as well. Once upon a time, North Korea had mad communist dictatorship neighbours all around it. Where are they now? Ended by America, for the most part. North Korea has outlasted them all.

What can you possibly do to threaten a country whose leadership cares not the tiniest bit for the welfare of their own people? Absolutely nothing. Kim Jong Un knows it. And now Theresa May knows it too.

A new strategy was urgently needed. The ultimatum got jettisoned. A new deadline was produced. April 12 now, if the deal doesn’t get through. May 22 if it does. Or an even longer one. Or no deadline at all. Donald Tusk strolled out to make a few jokes about “how much space there is still left in hell,” for any British MPs thinking about voting down the deal. His audience, European journalists and officials mainly, laughed loudly along, unable to conceal their glee at the joke that Britain has turned itself into.

Theresa May appeared next, still standing, for now, and thus able to do her best to re-package her most recent humiliation as a victory. And in the hurry for all this finally to be announced at midnight, it’s quite possible most people may not have noticed Brexit’s last dignity exhaling its final breath.

That had happened a few moments before, when a man called Philippe Lamberts, a Belgian Green Party MEP, wandered on to Sky News for a short chat. He couldn’t have been any less ambiguous if he’d tried. EU leaders had been arguing for hours for one simple reason. They were trying to come up with the very easiest timetable possible that would allow the House of Commons, finally, to take control of the Brexit process away from Theresa May and sort it out themselves.

This, once upon a time had been what Brexit was all about – taking back control, restoring parliamentary sovereignty, the hard right Tory wet dream. And not only had we now, one horrific referendum down, had to get the European Union to help us take our own control back, but here was a short, polite Belgian man in glasses, very slowly, and very patiently explaining to us how to do it, as if to an angry toddler who can’t get the lid off a jar of sweets.