For goodness sake, Theresa May, you have nothing to lose. Do whatever the waverers want. Publish the legal advice on backstop. Publish the Home Office white paper (call it green) on immigration post-Brexit. Go to Brussels and say you must have one last attempt at even the tiniest adjustment to the backstop. Otherwise all Brussels’ work on Brexit will have been a waste of time. Who on earth wants that? At least it is worth one last try. Otherwise we are doomed to a crash.
The course of Brexit is now so shambolic that each day produces a new lurch towards the cliff edge. But it is not helped by May still appearing to be on planet zog. Her energy has been awesome and her conviction truly impressive. But her mantras seem wooden and unreal. She should be frank and admit that this deal is not very good, and that is because it was never going to be.
Boris Johnson’s madcap “have our cake and eat it” slogan was infantile. Neither he nor his ramshackle hard Brexiters have ever presented a remotely plausible alternative. Whatever nonsense was talked during 2016, hard Brexit was going to be wretched to negotiate – which is why those who tried have all resigned. Brussels is the senior partner in any deal, and would not make it easier. So there was no point in presenting any deal to the British people as advantageous. It is the least-worst option, not the pretend-best.
May is rightly determined to forestall no deal, a responsibility abdicated by almost everyone else in parliament. To her, the price of moving on to the next stage of Brexit is staying, for the time being, in the customs union. But since this is supposedly what most MPs want, in some shape or form, why do they not back her? And why does she not sell it to them in these terms – that she is indeed just kicking this can down the road into the transition period. May finds it hard to make conviction sound convincing. The country needs some indication that she sees things as it does: facing an emergency that requires humility and realism from the person in charge.
There are clear signs of furniture starting to shift in the fog. A majority of MPs – not least in the wavering centre on which the deal depends – appear to want a form of Brexit along the spectrum of a customs union/single market/Norway option. That option is plainly available under the deal’s political addendum. Were it formally on the table as the long-term answer to Brexit, as it should be, putting it to another referendum would make sense. For the time being, some last attempt to get the deal as it stands must be the least damaging way of getting through the next three months. Not to see this is wilfully negligent of MPs. Just when the country wants them to rise above party, they revert to their most basic instincts.
• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
