Brexit means Brexit, but Theresa May has decided the people mustn't find out what it really means

Even within the overall context of the government’s grip on the Brexit process, which for some years now has made the Fawlty Towers hotel look like the moon landings, the latest comparatively minor train wreck is still worth briefly slowing down to admire.

In Theresa May’s new year reshuffle (the one that was prompted by her de facto Deputy Prime Minister Damian Green making “misleading statements” about porn found on his work computer, not the one about the Defence Secretary’s wandering hands, or the DfID Secretary’s secret meetings with the Israeli Prime Minister or the Home Secretary not knowing her own department had targets for the deportation of ethnic minority British pensioners), she was widely expected to appoint a specific minister for “No Deal” Brexit. She didn’t, in the end, but Brexiteer Steve Baker joined the department with effective responsibility for that job.

He then quit over the Chequers “agreement” (the one that wasn’t an “agreement” because the brexit secretary and the foreign secretary resigned over it, and the EU has completely ruled it out anyway), after having spent several months attacking various government departments for not doing enough for planning for the horror show that would be “no deal” Brexit.

And now, plans to release details of those plans to the general public, and to businesses, to warn them quite what a horror show “no deal” Brexit would be, have been canned, because hard Brexiteers like Steve Baker (though not Steve Baker specifically) have dismissed it all as “Project Fear 2”, and a strategic attempt by Theresa May to bounce the public into backing her Chequers Agreement, which the EU has already ruled out in any case.

It means that the various leaflets and online videos planned to be drip fed to the public throughout August and early September, warning of possible delays at Dover, and possible shortages of various foods and medicines, and rising prices, and even, it has been suggested, some vague advice not to book any flights until we’re sure they won’t be grounded, will now all be released in a single day in late August.

It is, even by the unprecedentedly high standards of Brexit, quite the multiple WTF clustergasm. On the rare occasions, over the last two years, that even Theresa May herself cannot face saying the words “Brexit means Brexit” she tends to turn instead to her second favourite stock phrase, which is that she will “deliver on the will of the British people.”

Meanwhile, the version of the will of the British people she is trying to deliver, namely a slightly softer Brexit that offers a faintly manageable solution to the Northern Irish mess, is castigated as a betrayal of the will of the British people by the hard Brexiteers. And they are the people whose own version of the will of the British people now has to be kept secret from the British people, for fear that the will of the British people will be to never, ever vote Tory again.

That the latest impossible contortion Theresa May must attempt is to have to keep the public in the dark about the various doomsday scenarios her own unhinged wing claims it voted for, is right up there with some of Brexit’s lowest moments yet, and there have been no shortage of those.

The warnings that the government will now keep quiet include using the Royal Air Force to deliver crucial supplies of food and medicine to isolated communities and vulnerable people including the elderly. No one is sure how the Border Force would operate. Queues at Heathrow and Gatwick are already an international embarrassment, and that is under the current, far less complicated system. Though admittedly, the grounding of planes would at least sort that problem out.

Even as the public is kept in the dark about the risks it has itself brought on, it would be fair to point out there have been some warnings. It is almost a year, for example, since John Redwood wrote a piece for The Sun newspaper, in which he made clear which food and drink items he expected the public to stop eating and drinking in order to satisfy his deranged sovereignty cravings. Australian and New Zealand wines are “fine” he said, so “no need to buy European.” The same would apply to countless types of cheese and ham and all manner of European produce that enriches people’s quality of life in ways they may only appreciate if or when they are gone.

The political question at hand is whether the country really would blame the Tories for the mess they voted for. The Conservative party stretching its own private Europe neurosis on to the country as a deranged attempt to solve its internal problems will definitely go down as the most self-indulgent thing any governing party has ever done. But at least for the foreseeable future, the alternative is Jeremy Corbyn. Whether there is any depths the Conservatives can sink to before the public reverts to that option is for now the only unanswered question that remains.