The longer Brexit goes on, the more it comes to resemble one of those weird Animal Channel documentaries about a guy who keeps a lion in his backyard but gets peculiarly angsty when you ask to count how many fingers his children have got.

Taking control of it is one thing. But at the end of twenty four hours when it has rampaged uncontrollable around Westminster perhaps like never before, the question of taking responsibility for it appears to be quite another.

The Brexit department thinks it wants it, but we've seen its numbers now and we know it can’t afford to keep it. The House of Lords has had a look at it and wants to give it back to the people, hoping this time it might see it for what it really is, and decide to destroy it.

Late on Monday night, government analysis was leaked and then published by Buzzfeed, cheerily concluding there is absolutely no Brexit outcome that won’t leave the UK poorer than remaining in the EU. Brexit Minister Steve Baker was duly deployed to the despatch box of the House of Commons to explain that economic forecasts were pointless, despite his own department having produced them. That they weren’t a secret, it was merely that they weren’t complete, and don’t worry the complete ones will be circulated when they’re ready, but they’ll still be pointless.

Meanwhile, over the Lords there was real panic. Traditionally, when the House of Lords agrees to meet before lunch, it means someone or other is trying to abolish it, and this was no different in its way.

The upper chamber has been an anachronism at the top of the British parliamentary system since the early 1700s. That Brexit, a huge public vote that unfortunately almost all parliamentarians think is a disaster, is coming up from the other end to meet is a threat to the Lords, and their £300 a day rate, of existential proportions.

Fully 200 of them had put their names down to speak, the largest debate in its eight hundred year history. RIghtly or wrongly, Brexit has been cast as the elite vs the people, and it has stuck. In such context, that the vast majority of the elite were lining up to tell the common man how he’d got it wrong, was unfortunate. But some were there to tell them to be careful.

Lord Dobbs, best known for having written the novel House of Cards, now transformed into landmark UK and US TV series, had a dire warning. “We ourselves agonise over reform, about reducing our numbers and increasing our effectiveness, which is, I suppose, tacit acceptance that the House of Lords is not entirely fit for purpose,” he told them. “If we were to make a constitutional Horlicks of this Bill, we will have made that point inescapable. We are unfit for purpose and the tumbrils will not be far behind.”

The Liberal Democrat peers, of which they are a hundred, warned gravely of a “power grab” that was underway by the government. It is almost sad to have to mention that for decades the Lib Dems have campaigned to abolish the Lords and replace it with an elected upper chamber. The trouble with elected bodies, at least at the moment, is that the voters have a tendency to abolish Lib Dems.

Labour’s arch remainers stood up to do their thing. Lord Adonis told whoever was listening that we must not “throw it all away”, it apparently being our shared history with Europe. Too little, too late.

None of this is to suggest that aren’t plenty of people out there in the Westminster village, willing to find a home for our troubled lion. Indeed, one humble young chap was willing to speak up for the man in the street, in his own inimitable way.

“If we,” he said, “In this gilded, crimson echo chamber of Remain, this neo-Jacobite hold-out for the Euro-king across the water, hold up this bill, we won’t stop Brexit but we might hurt Britain.”

Someone’s prepared to back control of Brexit then. Come on Theresa, just give it to him!

Trouble is, it was 5th Viscount “Matt” Ridley. And the last thing he took control of was Northern Rock, by virtue of daddy being on the board, and he stood down in 2007 when, you might recall, it suffered the first run on a bank in the UK in 150 years. Later investigations would point the finger directly at senior management.