I cannot self-terminate,” Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 says to Sarah Connor at the end of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. “You must lower me into the steel.” The same appears to be true of Theresa May. No matter how judgmental all this week’s judgment days seem to be for the prime minister, the unit is incapable of overriding its programming. So who’s going to press the button, staring mournfully into its eyes as the molten metal claims it, because this is the only way it can end?

The Tory MPs known to have sent a letter of no confidence in May Read more

Not Michael Gove, it seems, who apparently won’t be resigning despite having reportedly turned down the offer of Brexit secretary, a position that has eventually gone to … hang on, where’s my lorgnette … former junior health minister Stephen Barclay. Oof. The DExEU gig’s got all the job prospects the al-Qaida number three position used to have. There was a time when the US was killing Osama’s number three about once a month.

Perhaps the Department for Exiting the European Union could take its lead from Have I Got News for You, which changed to a system of rotating hosts after running into repeat difficulties with its main anchor. The arrangement certainly made the career of one Boris Johnson, which serves as a reminder that most of the terrible ideas in the UK are interconnected. And usually went to school with each other.

Anyway, according to reports, Gove said he would only take the Brexit secretary job vacated by Dominic Raab if he could ditch the upcoming summit, go back to the EU and renegotiate the deal. To which the only reply is: see you in the time vortex, buddy! Also, I have a new worst Doctor. Michael is the only one whose Tardis feels smaller on the inside, because his wife’s filled the entire thing up with an 80-grand kitchen.

Still, please note that incoming Brexit secretaries reckon they can demand a dressing room rider, like they’re J-Lo or someone. I want a white chaise longue, 287 white candles spelling out TAKE BACK CONTROL OF TAKING BACK CONTROL, and a deal with all the bad bits picked out. Also I don’t do stairs.

As for what motivated Michael not to go down the disloyal shit route for the second time since the referendum, it’s incredibly difficult to decide which of his three nocturnal visitors might have swung it. Don’t forget that Gove was against the Good Friday agreement, so perhaps it was the Ghost of Christmas Past, DUP MP Sammy Wilson, who pointedly described the deal as a “punishment beating”. Maybe it was Ghost of Christmas Present, Dominic Raab, who likes it to be known that he is a black belt in karate, but will now be seen as holding a 10th dan in doomed self-interest. Or was it Michael’s Ghost of Christmas Future, Lord Tebbit, who pulled back his cowl to rasp that May’s deal “smells of Neville Chamberlain coming back from Munich”?

Play Video 2:23 Highlights from Theresa May's LBC phone-in - video

Either way, as one source told the Sunday Times’ Tim Shipman, Gove is staying “to get this in a better place”, along with Liam Fox, Penny Mordaunt, Andrea Leadsom and Chris Grayling. Oh dear. Chris Grayling saying he’s going to help is a bit like Lennie from Of Mice and Men saying he’ll dog-sit for you.

It is a measure of how screwed we are that this lot look like bally heroes compared with Nigel Farage, who has spent the week repeatedly shrieking a load of Trump-wank about “the worst deal in history”. Um, dude? I actually ran into a T-2000 from the future this week, and he told me that your plea deal with Robert Mueller ends up being way worse.

Still, we do keep hearing that May’s deal isn’t good for anyone. Rubbish. It’s amazing for early-00s songstress Dido, who’s looking at a bumper week of royalties as picture editors set an estimated 37 primetime news montages to White Flag. “Right, slow the footage of the PM approaching her lectern right down, so it hits the ‘go down with this ship’ bit. Christ, that’s haunting. Tell you what, I’ll walk right out of the Royal Television Society Awards if we lose to News at Ten again.”

To Westminster, then – a sort of middle-management Westeros, where mostly terrible actors obsess over court politics, and the electorate are just CGI casualties in the Battle of the Bastards. When you play the game of thrones, you couldn’t give one-eighth of a toss what’s going to happen to some boring little wannabe car-plant worker on Teesside when there’s no deal.

Which seems as good a time as any to get to Jacob Rees-Mogg. That a bizarre class-dysmorphic whose ludicrous act was seen through by 13-year-old Etonians in the 1980s should have emerged as a person of any consequence whatsoever in 2018 is yet another mark of how far Britain has regressed in terms of self-esteem and mobility. Quite what Rees-Mogg’s creepily oversized suits are disguising is unclear, but he had better hope he’s got a wodge of no-confidence letters in there and a plan to manage the resultant chaos, or nanny’s going to have to change the sheets again. The family gift for predicting the future seems to have inured Rees-Mogg to the possibility that he may be about to enter the history books, but not in a hot way.

There he would arguably be footnoted by former No 10 chief of staff Nick Timothy, who this week savaged May for a deal that is virtually the only possible logical destination of the red lines he personally laid down for her. Thanks so much, Captain Hindsight! When the last job in the worst-hit economic region is lost, Timothy will still be in work, probably writing a Daily Telegraph column called something like Winning Ugly. I will come to terms with the fact that I may never open an action franchise before he comes to terms with his part in any of this shitshow.

And yet, even in an age where the bar is set somewhere near the Earth’s core, it was incredibly difficult to determine who had let themselves down the most this week. David Davis had to phone in this morning’s Today programme interview from the US, which felt appropriate, given he phoned the Brexit secretary job in for two years. I guess it’s nice he’s in Washington. As the furious former permanent secretary at the Foreign Office put it: “He could hardly be bothered to go to Brussels.”

So where are we now? Bright spots are not in ready supply. By the time you read this, both everything and nothing could have changed. Still, I certainly permit myself a howl of laughter every time I recall a line uttered by Johnny Mercer this year. “I don’t want to spend all my time arguing about Europe,” the Plymouth MP declared. “That’s not why I joined the Conservative party.” Oh, mate. I too read Playboy for the interviews.

But I’m afraid, whichever way you slice the maths, we are all due another trip to Tory Elsinore. Sooner or later, we will once more be condemned to watch a load of am-dram overlords stab their way to a solution. Expect another miscast Fortinbras to ensue.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist and the 2018 Comment Awards commentator of the year

• This article was amended on 19 November 2018. The location of car-plant workers was changed from Teesside to Wearside, but has now been changed back and the word “wannabe” added for clarification.