Could Theresa May’s failure to come up with new Brexit proposals be more cunning than it looks?

The late Les Dawson, a wonderful comedian who I concede may not be familiar to a younger generation, had an excellent trick.

He used to play the piano. Badly.

Deliberately badly, that is.

Dawson was, as it happens, a very fine musician, which is just as well because to play a familiar piano piece but timing the bum notes just right took extraordinary skill.

As we’ve recently been reminded, another comedy pianist Eric Morecambe put it very well to Andre Previn: all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order.

I am put in mind of this comedy routine by Britain’s negotiations with the European Union: all the right combinations of threat, compromise and surrender – but not necessarily in the right order.

Could it be, then, that the talks could only be going so badly by design, rather than the more obvious reasons of gross incompetence turbocharged by vanity? Is it, as journalists are prone to imagine, an elaborate subterfuge by Theresa May, Geoffrey Cox and Patrick Barclay to provoke one faction or other in the Conservative party to fall into line; or a purposeful show played out to the EU negotiators, a stratagem so subtle and clever that we cannot discern its precise purpose?

Can it really have happened by accident that, three years after the referendum, the United Kingdom – fifth biggest economy in the world, nuclear power, seat on the UN Security Council, longest reigning monarch, all that – is being given 48 hours to sort itself out?

Yes, is the short answer. We have been going round in ever decreasing circles more or less continually since the vote in 2016, and the current debacle should, in that context, come as no surprise to anyone.

The whole exercise has been an adventure into what we now call “cakeism” – having it and eating it; a concept once publicly endorsed by Boris Johnson with only the faintest whiff of irony.

Those, like me, who expected something a bit better than this to emerge from Brexit have been sorely disappointed. In fact, everyone is sorely disappointed, up to and including the PM herself.

So I am greatly looking forward to next week, which is when “no deal” Brexit will be killed off – a threat that everyone knows to be a bluff anyway. Unless everything is delayed again it will be the most “make or break” few days for Theresa May since, well, the last make or break few days. About a fortnight ago.

One novelty occurs to me. Listening carefully to the chancellor’s ever-so-reasonable interview on the BBC Today programme this morning, I came away confirmed in my impression that he would resign if the prime minister asked him to vote for a “no deal” Brexit.

Thus, if Ms May and the whips did push their luck with Philip Hammond, and given the parliamentary timings, he would have to quit as chancellor of the exchequer either just before or just after he has delivered his Spring Statement about the economy and the public finances.

The resignation of a chancellor is an uncommon and highly significant event. The last was in 1989 – Nigel Lawson, whose departure paved the way for that of his prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, a year and a month later.

Ms May would probably not last quite as long, all things considered. If Amber Rudd, David Gauke, Greg Clark and Philip Hammond quit her Cabinet, taking a dozen or more minsters of state with them, she’d have to make some rapid battlefield promotions. The government would not survive such a collapse, and even the stubborn Ms May knows it.

We could end up with our first female chancellor, Liz “The Truss” Truss (who has said publicly she could cope with hard Brexit), but that would be scant consolation. That is why Ms May will not push the point with the cabinet.

This is why hard Brexit will not happen. It’s good news, for most people.

So that leaves the various varieties of “soft” Brexit, which are uniformly unsatisfactory for the well-known reason that they leave Britain as a rule taker not a rule maker, unable to make the best of Brexit. Which, in turn, leaves Remain, so to speak. Given the outcome of the referendum in 2016, it will be necessary to obtain the people’s consent for this, or to press on with the only deal that actually exists – the prime minister’s one.

Or else we can carry on going go around in circles. Some of us are getting dizzy.