Sergei Skripal's poisoning is Theresa May's Falklands moment – but she will not rise from the ashes as Thatcher did

Tick tock goes the countdown clock, and the tension mounts with every passing moment.

When Big Ben chimes midnight, will the Russian ambassador have yielded to the awesome might of Theresa May, and coughed on his president’s behalf to the nerve agent attack in Salisbury?

At the time of writing, some 12 hours before it expires, the hunch is that this ultimatum will be treated like the one given to the German ambassador in 1939.

The deadline back then was a more genteel 11am on a Sunday morning. People stopped mowing lawns and turned on the crystal sets to hear Neville Chamberlain gravely tell them that no such undertaking (to withdraw from Poland) had been received, and that consequently this country was at war with Germany.

God knows why May opted for midnight. Perhaps she wanted to entrench the story’s darkly pantomimic flavour with a Cinderella reference. But she won’t go as far as Chamberlain in any broadcast about her revenge plans for that Slavic Prince Charming at 12.01am tomorrow.

Russia isn’t the Third Reich, Putin isn’t Hitler, Western democracy isn’t on the line, Britain would struggle these days to win a war with San Marino, and the last character May wants to play is Chamberlain.

If she was a bit appeasy as Home Secretary in the aftermath of Alexander Litvinenko’s murder, that was then. Now she wants to style herself after a different predecessor.

The last time a beleaguered female Tory PM had to deal with a foreign power invading British soil, it was her salvation. Whether May can profit from Salisbury like Margaret Thatcher did from the Falklands, the parallels must have occurred to her.

Facing a Labour leader from the far left at a time of artificially inseminated austerity, Thatcher appeared to be on political death row on the April 1982 day when the Argentines took Port Stanley. If she was relying on the US President’s support, Reagan stayed as studiedly neutral as Trump (for rather different reasons) has so far done.

Despite that, Thatcher wasn’t having it. Off sailed the task force, and within weeks the dead woman walking was reborn as a union jack-draped Gloriana, sailing serenely towards a landslide re-election.

After her nine months of hell since the election, you can’t blame May for daydreaming. But how to make it come true? What can she do when the ambassador brushes aside the accusation?

Whatever she announces by way of retaliation – expelling diplomats, authorising cyberattacks, tightening oversight of oligarchic finances or putting a 3000 per cent tariff on Beluga – will be targeted more at her domestic audience than the Kremlin.

Butch threats can only help Putin. Days before his landslide re-election, he hardly needs the assistance. But talk of reprisals feeds neatly into the poor, bullied little Russia narrative that helps sustain him in power.

Assuming he was responsible, using such a blatant and traceable mode of vengeance was the panto villain’s arch wink to the audience. Even this genus of weaponry’s name seems deliberately comical. Novichok sounds like one of Pikachu’s mates from first-generation Pokemon.

What May might be able to do is dip into Putin’s playbook to spark patriotic fever from a sense of isolated victimhood. Not only are those beastly Europeans ganging up on us in Brussels. Now we’ve got the wicked Russians threatening life and limb in our tranquil cathedral cities. We are under attack from all sides, and only she can protect us.

For that to have a chance of working, she also needs an enemy within, and Jeremy Corbyn wasted no time in auditioning for the role.

What he told the Commons on Monday was perfectly sensible and politically dangerous. With the Falklands, Michael Foot was absolutely supportive. Many of his MPs didn’t like it, but he knew the risk of allowing himself, as an arch leftie, to be portrayed as unpatriotic during a conflict.

Corbyn is either braver or more naive. He offered a gift to the Tories, their press sponsors and his back bench refuseniks by calling for more dialogue with Putin.

His argument makes perfect sense. Ever since its invasion of Georgia in 2008, the West’s endless demonising of Russia has been a geopolitical disaster. The failure to appreciate Russia’s paranoia about the integrity of its borders, and the disregard for where the nationalist path on which post-imperial wounded pride might lead it, were monstrous strategic miscalculations. More talk might have avoided them, and seems the only feasible way to defuse the abysmal relations now.

But being right and being smart are not always bedfellows. Corbyn’s timing gives the Tories and their media friends a chance to play the traitor card. Whether that will have any traction with the electorate isn’t clear. When dunces like me assume he’s made a tactical error, we tend to be ridiculed by subsequent polls.

In Downing Street, meanwhile, the mantra du jour must be Rahm Emanuel’s “Never let a crisis go to waste”. Any desperately weak PM would sell Gibraltar to the Spanish for a pair of Barbary apes for the opportunity to deliver a thrillingly dramatic ultimatum to the President of the Russian Federation.

Whatever Ambassador Cinderellavic says before the midnight chimes, she cannot walk much of a walk. A declining power up against Putin’s crafty version of global guerrilla warfare is on a road to nowhere.

As for the talk she talks, it won’t be to Jeremy Corbyn’s ameliorative tastes. The challenge for May is to make the empty threats sound less wretchedly impotent than King Lear’s “I will do such things – what they are yet, I know not. But they shall be the terrors of the earth!”

If she can do that, and emerge from this as a home counties Britannia, that political death sentence might be commuted for a good while yet.