She’s been hesitant, she’s been uncertain, she been at times almost overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the plot that is now hers to bring to resolution, but here was a Prime Minister at long last regained of the full dramatic purpose of her character. Theresa May had taken back control, her hands firmly on the steering wheel, her foot slammed on the accelerator, speeding out to meet the horizon.

If such scenes sound familiar, perhaps you too have seen Thelma and Louise, even if it wasn't quite the same. This is real life, and you and me and your unborn grandkids are all sandwiched in the back with some loon in a tweed jacket in the back, screaming at them to go faster, and the last hope of anyone turning up whose job it might be to shout "Cut!" is off somewhere making jam and signing apples.

Perhaps that’s too complicated an analogy. Perhaps this was a more amateur movie, lower production values, more shocking: One Girl. One Cake. The Prime Minister had it, she ate it, she magically reproduced it from God knows where and ate it again. And then suddenly there it was untouched in front of her. If only we’d known in advance we could all have filmed ourselves watching in simultaneous horror and amazement and uploaded our reactions on Youtube.

In one breath, Theresa May was going to use Brexit to "build a stronger, fairer Britain." In the next, if the EU didn’t cede to her demands, corporate tax rates would be slashed, turning the "fairer Britain" that had only existed for about 20 seconds into a tax haven for the world’s biggest companies.

We’d be leaving the single market but demanding meaningful access to it. Leaving the customs union but retaining associate membership of it. Doing our own trade deals but seeking to hang onto existing ones, promising to be a "good friend and neighbour to Europe" but threatening to destabilise it if it didn’t meet our demands (good luck with that).

Some have reacted with surprise that the pound should have risen against the dollar as the Prime Minister confirmed that, yes, Britain would be leaving the single market, an "act of self harm" when she campaigned for Remain seven short months and eight political lifetimes ago. Others have reacted with even more surprise, that the same people for whom the decimation of sterling on 23 June was "good for exports" are now of the view that its comparatively miniscule increase on Tuesday morning is suddenly vindication of their actions.

But such things are normal these days. Britain has never before had a Prime Minister that has failed their way to the top, which partly explains the surprise in some quarters that Ms May should be so firmly resolved for more of the same.

She took aim at the "unprecedented levels of net migration and the sheer volume of pressure that has been put on public services." Had she, in six years as Home Secretary, lowered non-EU migration – the part for which control does not need to be taken back because it has never been given away – to just a little bit less than the 188,000 it stood at in 2015, the referendum result might have fallen down on the side for which she uselessly campaigned. But taken together, these are the compound failures that have driven her right to the top.

(Of course, Britain has a sophisticated political culture, one with observers that will tell you she was "smart" or "clever" or "strategic" to call in the TV cameras and actively make the opposite case to the one she believed in, in the hope that she might be in prime position when the opposite happened. The simpler explanation, that the now-Prime Minister is a publicly funded, professional liar, is considered hopelessly naive.)

For obvious reasons, there never was a Thelma and Louise 2. Though there was a cliff involved, it wasn’t a cliffhanger. The viewer has permission to assume that, with the canyon floor rushing up to meet them, our two heroines do not come up with a way of making a success of their rather melodramatic exit.