“You know what? I’ve had it up to here. I’m sick to death of going round in circles, trying to achieve the impossible. Brexit is a complete shitshow. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. There is just no way any of this ends well, either for the country or for me.

“So let’s stop pretending there’s any way of making everyone happy. It’s a car crash. Pure and simple. And if anyone thinks they can do better, then let them have a go. I’m done with being trolled by all and sundry. It was bad enough being humiliated on a daily basis by Boris Johnson, David Davis, Michel Barnier and Donald Tusk, but now even the Lithuanian prime minister is joining in. Enough’s enough. So that’s it. I’m out of here. Sayonara losers.”

That’s the press conference Theresa May would like to have given at the end of yet another European council meeting at which no progress had been made toward resolving the Northern Ireland border. Or anything else for that matter. Stalemate with the clock ticking. Sure, Tusk and Juncker hadn’t actively trashed her as they had last time, but their efforts to sound reassuring had hardly been ... reassuring. A bit like a surgeon coming in to see you just after surgery and saying: “You’ll be up and about in next to no time” when you’ve just had both your legs amputated.

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Instead the prime minister inched her way slowly to the lectern. And breathe. This time she wasn’t going to lose it, as she had in Salzburg. No wild staring or heavy sweating. She was going to zen this one out. She would go into shutdown, pretend she wasn’t really there. Just say words, any words to get her out the other side. Set the mind to blank, survive the 15 minutes of pain and then she’d be on the next plane home.

There had been good progress on Brexit, she began. That was progress as in not actively going backwards. Or forwards. Given time, she was confident that a miracle might appear. That was it. All she had to say. Thank you and good night.

Journalists weren’t quite so easily palmed off, and soon May was facing incoming from all directions. It was pointed out that she kept making all sorts of contradictory promises that she couldn’t possibly keep. So when would she get off the fence and say who she was going to disappoint? May paused and went into automatic lockdown. That question hadn’t existed so she was going to answer another one entirely. She was going to get a good deal that would deliver on the result of the referendum. The end.

Next she even surprised herself by channeling her hitherto unknown inner Marxist with a dialectic analysis. Things going so disastrously badly right now was actually a sign we were tantalisingly close to a deal. The time to worry was when the negotiations appeared to be running smoothly. A few blank looks appeared on the faces of the assembled hacks, but none as blank as the prime minister’s. No one was better than her at being absent from her own life.

One by one her circuits shut down, so all that was left was a meaningless collection of random words plucked somewhere from deep inside her unconscious. When she had previously said she was open to the idea of an extension to the transition period she had in no way meant to give the impression she was open to the idea of an extension. Schrodinger’s Brexit was back on again. The once and future extension that both did and didn’t exist.

And with that she melted away. There had been no fine words. Not even a hint of defiance. A stronger leader, make that any sort of leader, might have observed that both Johnson and Davis had had their chance in government and achieved nothing of any note, so now was the time for her to impose her vision of the least damaging Brexit. But she couldn’t even manage that. She had been running on empty for over a year. All May had to offer was her own sense of resignation. A life of quiet desperation. A life that was getting steadily quieter and more desperate by the day.



