Theresa May must give the people a Final Say on the deal, or go down with her ship now

So much for Brexit day, then. The House of Commons delivered a third negative verdict on Theresa May’s Brexit deal on the very day it was supposed to come into effect. The majority against her was much smaller than it was before – but at 58 it remains too high for her, realistically, to have another attempt to carry the house. Speaker John Bercow will be under no pressure to relent and allow her to try it on.

It’s over.

What next? In her statement after the vote, the prime minister tried to sound defiant, and hinted that she might even come back to the house with her deal again. Old habits die hard. However, more realistically, and portentously, she also hinted at a more radical approach when she remarked that “we are reaching the limits of the processes of this house”. The probability of another general election or a referendum is growing.

More immediately, the Commons itself will seek to find a way forward that would prevent the no-deal Brexit on 12 April that no one, bar about 100 Conservative MPs, is prepared to countenance.

Easily the most likely outcome of the next round of these backbench deliberations is a cross-party agreement on either keeping the UK in the customs union, and/or holding a confirmatory referendum on the terms of Brexit, whatever they are likely to be. This is the package that parliament will probably ask the prime minister and her government to implement – a customs union with the EU plus a second referendum. That package is eminently acceptable to the EU and carries substantial majority support in the Commons – unlike the prime minister’s policy.

Ms May will then have a choice. She will either have to accept that carrying any sort of deal in the House of Commons will mean erasing some of her red lines, and splitting her party so badly she will have to rely on Labour, Liberal Democrat and SNP votes to get it over the line. Ms May’s profound and genuine sense of public duty and her commitment to deliver some form of Brexit will conflict with her own sense of personal pride.

Or she could refuse to do so, and another member of the cabinet would be required to undertake the messy task, in order to avoid a no-deal Brexit that has been ruled out by the House of Commons.

The other possibility is that Ms May will approach Brussels well before 12 April with a request for more time to settle the British position once and for all. It will then be in Brussels’s power to in effect determine the British people’s future – via a general election or a referendum.

The EU council and commission would be entitled to be sceptical about what another general election would achieve, either under Ms May as Conservative leader or one of the large field of rivals for the role. They might wonder what is the point of electing another hung parliament; what would be in the various parties’ manifestos; and what happens if the election is fought on issues other than Brexit. Given that both main parties are so badly divided anyway, and the unpredictable effects of the intervention of Nigel Farage‘s Brexit Party and the new Change UK group, the outcome is hard to call. A general election is a party-based solution to a question that obviously cuts across party lines. It cannot work.

A Final Say referendum would be much cleaner way of breaking the deadlock. The simplest thing, and perhaps the most attractive to Ms May personally, is for her to take her case to the country. She is not a natural campaigner, and she has never been in favour of this course of action. But if parliament cannot decide; if the EU will not grant the time for another general election; and if she is obliged to carry on doing her duty, then she must do the right thing and put the case for Brexit as it now exists to the British people, with the option to remain. She might, at the end of it all, confound her critics and win the support of the electorate. It would at least be an honourable way out, to go down with her ship.