Theresa May managed to say almost nothing of substance in her speech in Florence, bar an announcement that she wants a two-year transition/implementation period. The speech in Italy, planned under a bizarre level of secrecy and unavoidable hype, won’t actually shift the dial of possible outcomes and barely did more than kick the hard problems down the road by seeking a two-year extension.

Nobody from the EU side of the negotiation attended, and the offer to them was more of a pleading request that we be allowed more time to get our act together. The parameters for a deal looking increasingly narrow. The response of the team behind Brexit? Their champion Boris Johnson is doing everything he can to engineer a situation in which he is either sacked or has the latitude to resign. Having broken everything, the Brexiters are running away.

For anyone paying attention, the foreign secretary’s posturing in recent months has been nothing short of laughable: the suggestion that the EU could “go whistle” on the divorce bill was never much more than a bad joke. Theresa May acknowledged this in her speech. The EU has the UK over a barrel and we will pay for it, but from our political discourse you could often be forgiven for thinking that some people see the EU as the smaller negotiating partner.

We need a deal more than they do, we need a transition deal more than they do and yet the rhetoric has often been about getting the EU to bake the cake before the UK gets to both have and eat it. However much Theresa May talks about a partnership, we are the junior partner by a mile. Yet anyone with the discourtesy to point out the salient facts, or to set out the relative size of the UK and the EU – the EU economy accounts for about a fifth of global GDP and the UK accounts for about a fifth of the EU – is insufficiently patriotic. Anyone with reservations about Brexit is accused of talking down the economy.

Lately, blame is even being levelled at young people who oppose Brexit. While our own foreign secretary attacks the allegiances of the young, it’s been left to the EU’s Guy Verhofstadt to defend them, saying: “I think this is a binary, old-fashioned and reductionist understanding of identity. I think we need to be smarter, more open and more inventive then that.” We do need to be smarter, more tolerant of critics who challenge our current course, and we need to begin by realising that the UK has few genuinely good options left, and notice with alarm that prominent Brexiters are trying to distance themselves from the mess.

Despite the international setting for Theresa May’s speech the audience was significantly domestic because Brexit continues to be an issue of Conservative Party management. Not in living memory have secretaries of state so openly slapped each other down in public as Amber Rudd and Boris Johnson did over criticisms of backseat driving. We are witnessing an undeclared leadership battle and everyone in the car is shouting. For all that Brexit is about Conservative party management, there is precious little management in view. The only threat that still seems to work is the danger of Jeremy Corbyn becoming prime minister, but the longer that is seen as one of the Conservative Party’s greatest concerns, the more likely it becomes. Voters do not reward inward-facing parties.

The big offer in Florence was nothing but: it was a request to the EU to let us enjoy the benefits of membership for a while longer as we prepare for what comes next. There was scant detail about what might possibly follow. In that sense, very little if anything has changed. Increasingly, it looks likely that the UK might face the prospect of crashing out without a deal. Men like the inventor James Dyson and the pub entrepreneur Tim Martin have expressed their intense relaxation with crashing out, but few people appreciate the vast complexity of crashing out – what The Economist politely calls a “tortuous process.”

The EU has not budged an inch over the negotiations so far, quite possibly because they see just how inconceivable “no deal” really is. We have yet to accept how little bargaining power we have, and how essential a deal is to us. The EU could veto everything Theresa May has said today, and there weren’t many genuinely new offers to them that might turn their heads.

The veiled threats to quit and posturing from the foreign secretary are clearly designed to allow him to distance himself from compromise. Boris Johnson has signed on to May’s speech, but it was so limited in ambition that it merely kicked the can down the road. May will not fight the next election, so Johnson is engaged in the task of campaigning to the membership of the Conservative Party. May’s Brexit will require sacrifices that many who voted for it will find unpalatable. If Boris can either get sacked, quit on principle, or grumble sufficiently to let everyone know that he wouldn’t have paid the EU the sums that we inevitably will. Johnson can still try to be the champion for a fantasy Brexit that never was, the hero of a battle that he never got to fight. This is selfish, childish, irresponsible behaviour from our foreign secretary, but for him it might still prove to be politically savvy.

It defies belief that during the largest peacetime challenge the nation could face, the government is filled with people jostling for self-advancement and using the issue as a way to further our own ends, but we should remind herself that this isn’t new: pursuit of personal ambition is how we got this far, why one draft column was published over the other. Brexit is going badly, and the clearest sign of this is the way that its champion is doing what he can to wash his hands of it while the PM asks the EU if we can – please – kick the can down the road a little further.

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