When is a delay not a delay? When it’s an extension. We are now so far through the other side of the Brexit space-time continuum that words have lost all meaning. We are in a universe without rules in which the laws of physics have broken down. Where down is up and up is down. Where days are no longer days. Just event horizons of imagined time. Parallel universes of limitless possibilities.
In one of these universes, so small it’s barely even a single dimension, there is a Theresa May, who believes herself to be a reincarnation of the Iron Lady. A prime minister who has stood firm against a troublesome EU and is poised to lead the UK to the Brexit sunlit uplands. In a more familiar world, this new Iron Lady is just a heap of rusting metal. A piece of near obsolete computer junk, the Amstrad Maybot, now incapable of anything more than a dying SOS signal. Unaware she’s even in need of rescue. Just doing the bare minimum to get to the end of the day still in a job.
In Sharm El Sheikh on Monday, the prime minister had been adamant. Delay meant delay. And delay was something that could not be countenanced. We would be leaving the EU on 29 March. Less than 24 hours later, she gave a statement to the Commons in which she insisted that whatever she had said the previous day had not in fact been said. Rather than words from the past, they were a singularity. Words from a future of infinite density that had not yet materialised.
For the most part, MPs greeted May’s latest exhibition of absurdist performance art in amused silence. Delusion is now priced in to her every appearance at the despatch box, and it takes something exceptional to impress them. Merely saying that yesterday had never happened was nothing particularly out of the ordinary. Besides which, the prime minister’s software is now so unreliable it’s hard to tell if she actually knows what she’s saying, let alone if she means it. Artificial? Certainly. Intelligence? Not so much.
Then came the key points. May was horrified that some MPs might have thought she was trying to run down the clock and force them into accepting her deal that they had already overwhelmingly rejected, or risk either no deal or no Brexit. So to alleviate any uncertainty, she was going to give parliament the certainty of even longer uncertainty by offering it the chance of delaying Brexit for a couple of months in which nothing would change and then allow the country to go over a cliff edge at the end of June.
“I will stick by my commitments as I have done previously,” she insisted. Somehow she managed to say this with a straight face. One of the few advantages of being a woman without quality is that she is totally unaware that there are few promises she hasn’t broken. She concluded by praising her government’s record. It was time to celebrate the increased use of food banks and the 600th death of a homeless person in the last year.
Jeremy Corbyn had a bit of explaining to do himself. Having belatedly realised that losing support to the Independent Group wasn’t a particularly good look, the Labour leader had done his own reverse ferret by actually backing a second referendum that he had only ever intended to be entirely cosmetic. Not for the first time, Corbyn managed to give the impression of a man on time delay. Struggling not just to keep up with his own party but the modern world.
Though a few remainer MPs took some comfort from these unexpected turns of events, most were understandably more concerned that nothing much had changed. Other than that everything difficult had been delayed a few more months. Ken Clarke, Justine Greening, Yvette Cooper, Anna Soubry and Jess Phillips all made passionate speeches begging the prime minister to snap out of her fugue state and act in the national interest.
May merely retreated further into her shell. Her ability to misread her audience is uncanny. “Simples,” she said. Brexit as a Compare the Meerkat advert. She couldn’t even say how she would vote if any of the eventualities she was planning for were to occur. There again, she hadn’t even voted for her own motion at the last Brexit vote, choosing to back the Brady amendment instead. It’s a wonder she can even get herself dressed.
The Brexiters of the European Research Group looked far more relaxed. Jacob Rees-Mogg and Steve Baker left the chamber early, confident they would still get their no-deal Brexit sooner or later. Owen Paterson wittered on about badger sentry posts on the Irish border – he’s yet to find a point he can’t miss – while Patrick McLoughlin fawned. “My constituents are in awe,” he simpered. “The prime minister is breaking new ground.”
Indeed she is. She has now skipped past David Cameron in the coveted race to be the UK’s worst prime minister of the last 100 years. May headed for the exit. She had survived another day. Or was it yesterday? Or even tomorrow?
