“One of the most significant votes this House will ever take,” said Keir Starmer, winding up for Labour with formidable forensic authority in the midst of madness. “I could not have possibly seen the scale of calamity now upon us.” This was indeed a monumental event. What next? No one knows.

MPs ignore May’s pleas and defeat her Brexit deal by 149 votes Read more

Those who promised that leaving the EU meant “taking back control” have instead lost all control. The revolutionary Brexit Conservatives have brought down their own party and in effect their government. Tory extremists who voted down the prime minister’s deal while yearning for their utterly unobtainable “clean break” have lost control too: the one certainty is this parliament of chaos will ensure Britain does not leave the EU with no deal.

Listening from afar was the EU’s negotiator, Michel Barnier, who shot out a tweet to the Brexiteer lunatics, warning them not to indulge in the “dangerous illusion” that there will be even a split second of “transition” with a no deal. Out will be deadly out, like it was for Captain Oates.

Parliament itself is all that is left to seize control, as party discipline breaks on all sides. For the prime minister to declare a free vote tomorrow on no deal is a shameful and astonishing abdication of responsibility – or just despair in the face of the collapse of all authority. She has made clear she herself sees no deal as an unthinkable danger with “grave implications” – but not to whip against it is an extraordinary capitulation to her wild fringe. What, at this stage, is the point of pretending to hold together the party that has brought us to this pitiful state?

The Speaker made clear that the “opportunity will arise” shortly to test out every possible future. Bleakly, Theresa May laid them out: to revoke article 50; a second referendum; or another deal, but not hers. Note that the most obvious need – for a general election to release us from this House of horrors – was not on her agenda. Her broken party no longer has people in grey suits, figures of shadowy gravitas, to tell her to go so that another election under another leader might happen. The foghorn buffoonery of attorney general Geoffrey Cox shows how hollow the party is now. Foolishly they wasted their one annual vote of no confidence in their leader – and she won it.

But can she keep going? There has rarely, if ever, been a spectacle of more pathos than this beleaguered prime minister croaking her way excruciatingly through her speech, neglected and deserted by her own MPs on the empty benches behind her. Her late-night Strasbourg dash was all in vain. She held meeting after meeting pleading for her MPs to switch – but few did. What do her party’s rebels imagine they will achieve?

At least May spelled out one useful warning. When everything collapses around their ears, when Brexit proves a calamity, “It will be no good blaming the EU, responsibility would lie with this House.” And so it would – unless this House can pull back, revoke article 50 with a confirmatory public vote, and try to dismiss this whole desperate episode as a brief strange nightmare that history should forget.

There would be so much to obliterate from the history books: how did the DUP, who have wrecked their Stormont government, who absolutely fail to represent Northern Ireland’s 56% remainer voters, come to hold such power over the once mighty Tory party? How did a politician as inept as May come to preside over this most critical moment? How, for that matter, did Her Majesty’s Opposition fail abysmally to seize the hour and stand resolutely against the Brexit insanity? Jeremy Corbyn in his 25-minute speech today made one reference, one, to the second referendum his party overwhelmingly desires? So much for his lifetime of preaching the supremacy of party members’ views. Nonethless, Labour will not be to blame: the Brexit nightmare is all Tory.

Here we stand in a thick fog of constitutional and political confusion. There is no solution but to ask the people. Remain stands 8-10% ahead in the polls. May’s deal is nowhere with the voters. People want to “Get it over with”? The only way now is to stay in the EU, and forget all this ever happened. As for the fate of our pitiable prime minister, all that keeps her propped up in No 10 is the awful prospect of the lineup of contenders for her post. God help us all.

• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

• This article was amended on 13 March 2019 because an earlier version said that in his 25-minute speech before the Commons’ 12 March vote on Theresa May’s Brexit deal, Jeremy Corbyn “made not one reference, not one” to the option of staging a second public referendum on EU membership. This has been corrected to “made one reference, one”.