Brexit fatigue and Brexit bullying are Theresa May’s instruments of torture to grind recalcitrant MPs into passing her destructive deal. No more, says the Speaker: this war of attrition must stop. Her deal must change and if she brings one back, it must be “fundamentally different”. How different? He can’t say until he sees what plan, if any, she will present.

Rightly John Bercow complains of time wasted, of running down the clock as she tries to crush MPs against the concrete wall she herself constructed. No 10 was not forewarned of the Speaker’s ruling. Oddly, the Brexiteers were sounding pleased, presuming her deal as it stands can’t pass. They hope that no-deal beckons – still the legal certainty unless parliament passes something else. But the champion of the house will guarantee that MPs get the chance to stop no-deal dead.

This opens the door of hope for all sides. There must certainly now be a long delay: any substantial change to May’s deal needs renegotiation with the EU, and time and thought for the country. In crushing the life out of debate by using the clock, in using no-deal or no-Brexit as lethal weapons, the prime minister has caused a constitutional crisis not seen in our lifetimes. Bercow is right to seize back sovereignty for the Commons against the abuse of power by May and her chaotic government.

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How different all this might have been under a wiser, cleverer, more empathic and perceptive leader. She could have reached out from her first day to try to heal the great gash in the country caused by David Cameron’s reckless referendum. Imagine if she had called a national council, a Speaker’s conference or a commission of all parties and interests, with citizens’ assemblies to lay out what was actually possible and what was fantastical nonsense in ways forward. But that is a unicorn wish: she is what she is. The country fell into the hands of someone only capable of making a very bad situation infinitely worse.

The Speaker has frozen events at a shamefully low point in May’s progress. That once mighty Tory party power machine is submitting itself to the crudest blackmail by DUP Bible-bashers and bigots, bent on destroying hard-won peace on their island. Their mouths stuffed with gold, promised a Stormont lock (though they wrecked Stormont), these past masters of leverage dangle their support. But they may yet withhold it, as the government dances attendance on their every poisonous word, vassals indeed.

If May’s deal returns in any recognisable form, it’s even less clear now how many would back it. There may be too many no-deal implacables of the John Redwood hue, John Major’s old “bastards” who relish their lifelong rebellion against the party’s leaders more than they care about any Brexit. Tory leadership contenders eye one another warily. What will please the grassroots most: aiding Brexit or going down with the Brexit ship? For a sample of current idiocy, Lucy Allan, a Brexiter MP, told the Financial Times she may “consider supporting the prime minister’s deal, although in my view it is a worse option than remain”. Of course it is, and most MPs planning to vote for it know it.

The prime minister may yet frighten enough Brexiteers into backing something like her deal for fear of a long extension, unwelcome EU elections and no Brexit at all. If any deal passes, expect a national sigh of relief. Phew! It’s over! What stamina the woman has, what fortitude and resilience. But she will get the briefest reprieve. Either her executioners come for her, or she stays to face the music of what she has done.

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The awful truth would dawn that her deal settled almost nothing and the Brexit blood feud rolls on. Will the UK become Norway, Canada, Singapore – or some rogue-state Cayman Islands tax haven? Every passing month will show how deeply we will still be subject to EU laws and regulations, but with no say. There will no returning to the EU for years.

For the far more complex trade deal ahead, no lessons have been learned. There will be no unity in the government over what it wants, facing the next negotiations in the same dysfunctional state of internal conflict. Now Brexiteer MPs demand the sack for Olly Robbins, the chief negotiator with experience.

The UK will sit in Brussels corridors, outside meetings that decide rules we dare not diverge from, in need of their trade. The EU will change, with new commissioners, a new parliament, strangers to us now.

We will miss out on those promised good deals with the US and China: Australia has spent 10 years failing to make a deal with India. The US trade department is drawing up demands for any UK deal. As well as the chlorination, hormones and GM food, they want us to drop our “precautionary” safety-first principle for food and chemicals, pay higher US prices for NHS drugs, and forget controlling US tech giants. To strike a deal we need to cave in cravenly. Forget sovereignty.

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Every MP not blinded by Brexitmania knows the damage implicit in any Brexit. Look what we lose in security, in shared anti-terror and crime agencies. Look what we have lost already in prestige, in respect, as the world looks on amazed.

There is more hope, now that Bercow has asserted the supremacy of parliament. Who knows if anything like her bad deal is to be put again? But the spirit of the Kyle-Wilson motion will live on, so that any plan she has can’t pass without a confirmatory vote of the people.

Every poll for a year has put remain ahead – most by some 8% – and a delay means a better chance of a second vote. The country needs a long extension. To impose anything without a public vote would be the great denial of democracy, the great betrayal.

• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist