Six weeks ago Theresa May stood in Downing Street and announced that Britain needed a general election to strengthen her hand on Europe. This week, after a reputation-denting campaign in which she has failed to debate Europe or anything else, she has returned to the Brexit theme.

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Yet anyone who imagined this would be a Brexit election has been proved wrong. We have not had the campaign some predicted – not least in the rest of Europe, where it was assumed that Britain would have been treated to competing European visions.

In fact, both May and her opponents have avoided that. Nor have they provided a contest about Britain’s place in the world after Brexit and the Trump election. But neither have we had a contest about the post-Brexit relationship with the EU that would be best for the UK economy and for living standards.

On that, all is silence. There has been almost nothing about the hand that May should play in the Brexit negotiations. Nor a competition of overarching ideas beyond May’s platitudes about global Britain. Issues that are likely to dominate the coming parliament, such as the price for the UK’s exit from the EU, the mechanics of a transitional deal and dispute settlement mechanisms between the UK and the EU27, have been wholly ignored.

Instead May has tried to limit the argument to whether to affirm the 2016 referendum result or not. Her speech in Guisborough yesterday made this very clear. It was addressed solely to leave voters, not to remainers. She hymned the leave vote as the British people’s choice of a brighter future, even though 48% disagreed. She explicitly invited leave voters to use the election to reaffirm the 2016 referendum result. You would never have guessed that May herself was once a remainer, and that millions remain uneasy about Brexit.

There are reasons for this failure. Leavers treat calls for debate about Brexit terms as surrogate challenges to the original Brexit decision. Many opponents of Brexit collude in giving the same impression. The Europhobic press drowns out all views other than its own. And the fall in the Tory poll lead may have forced May to take a more uncompromisingly anti-European tone than she may originally have intended.

Underlying all this is a fiercely contested aspect of modern British political culture. Everything about the politics of Brexit is a reminder that a representative parliamentary system such as Britain’s has a deeply uncomfortable relationship with referendums. May’s readiness to bow to the referendum makes a certain kind of political sense. But as a matter of principle it is hard to square with the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty.

Some of the failure to debate Brexit properly over the past six weeks lies with the opposition parties. The Liberal Democrats misread the readiness of remain voters to go on fighting the referendum, especially under Tim Farron’s leadership. So too, though, did Tony Blair. The SNP got the issues of Brexit and Scottish independence too tangled up for their own, or anyone else’s, good. And Labour, deeply divided over Brexit, chose a campaign on domestic economic and social issues as a less contentious focus.

May remains the principal culprit. She has filled out some of her Brexit thinking over the months, but remains deliberately and disgracefully vague about both the strategy and detail. If she possesses a strategic post-Brexit vision for Britain’s geographically ordained relationship with Europe, she has not shared it. She has never once tried to reach out to the 48% of the country who voted to remain; instead she has taken them for granted. In reality her public policy still boils down to her view that Brexit means Brexit.

It therefore increasingly looks as if the next election – not this one – will be the real Brexit election. That election is not due until 2022, but it is not hard to foresee circumstances in which the government of the day, or the opposition parties, will want an early election at some point after the end of the Brexit negotiations in 2019-20. That’s because, although May cannot admit it, a Brexit deal is likely to require compromises that some on the government benches will not be willing to swallow. It may fall to the voters to decide whether the deal goes ahead.

If May were a better political leader, and certainly if she were a different one, those dangers could have been avoided. She was surely right, last summer, to step forward to carry out the will of the people as expressed in the referendum, dismaying though that vote had been. Yet instead of being a bold leader, she has been a cowardly one.

That’s because she has always been afraid to say openly that a good Brexit deal must involve trade-offs to preserve the national interest of remaining close to Europe. A stronger leader than May would have said publicly that a sovereign post-Brexit Britain could leave the EU but nevertheless stand shoulder to shoulder with the EU27 on issues from trade and security to workers’ rights and macroeconomic policy. Yes, it would mean that we would be law-takers more than law-makers – though we would always retain the right to make our own laws and try to influence theirs – but the prosperity and peace of Europe has to remain a fundamental pillar of the UK national interest.

When May speaks about Europe, the delusions of great power posturing and post-imperial greatness are never far away

Instead, whenever May speaks about Europe, as she did again yesterday, she reflexively defers to the anti-European right, not the pro-European left. The instinct to pose as Europe’s strong antagonist, not its strong ally, wins out. Subtler cooperative messages are always carefully concealed in more intransigent verbal clothing. The delusions of great power posturing and post-imperial greatness are never far away.

The upshot, as the French newspaper Libération said this week, is that Britain is caught in a trap of May’s own making. On the one hand we face a newly confident EU, driven by Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron: on the other, an isolationist, rule-scorning America under Donald Trump. Trump’s dismissal of global warming poses the choice in the starkest terms. Which is our ally? And which the threat to our way of life?

Characteristically, May has ducked big strategic questions of this kind. Yet the questions remain. Increasingly, Britain risks being trapped between a Europe it spurns and an America it should reject. May blunders on, but it is Britain that will pay the price.