Theresa May’s backstop travails show Brexit for what it’s become: the pursuit of the impossible

At some point, probably in the relatively near future, Theresa May will no longer be prime minister. Time will pass. Walking holidays will be taken. Food will be cooked. Food will be eaten (a real benefit). And with a wistful air she’ll look back on all this and wonder: “Did that really happen?”

To which the answer, quite incredibly, will be yes. The events that are currently occurring in British politics are, I am fairly confident, real. None of this is a vivid helldream we have woken into and are yet to wake again. Which brings us on to today.

Theresa May went to Belfast, where she stood in front of a grey window on a cold and rainy day, a grim tableau of perfectly British misery, framed by a grim tableau of perfectly British misery. The only way to tell them apart was that one had been generously spattered with bird s*** and the other had not.

Here, with 52 days until Brexit, she told her audience she was “committed” to finding a solution to the Northern Irish backstop problem. But now, it should be so clear it should be visible from space, is not the time to be committed to finding solutions. The time to be committed to finding solutions was long ago. Now is the time at which the solutions should have been found. And if they haven’t been found, then perhaps it’s time to be committed to considering the possibility that they might never be found. That they don’t exist. That the backstop is the backstop is the backstop and there is no way over it under it round it or through it.

If there were a way to have no hard border at all between two countries that have different customs regulations, someone would have come up with it by now. They have not, and they will not, which is why the backstop is there, and why it will always be there.

It is now three weeks since her deal was rejected by the House of Commons, and a week since the House of Commons also passed the Brady amendment. The Brady amendment mandates Theresa May to go back to Brussels and demand the impossible. To tell them to renegotiate the withdrawal agreement and, in any meaningful sense, get rid of the backstop. They are not going to do it. They could not have made that any clearer. And so here she was, in Belfast, saying she is not proposing a deal with no backstop, but merely seeking “changes to the backstop”.

In other words, having decided the only possible way to carry on in her job was to reluctantly agree to do the impossible, now, here she was, from a safe distance across the Irish Sea, quietly telling her hard Brexiteer colleagues that – what do you know? – the impossible was impossible all along.

Oh, and here’s another thing that various sensible people are saying with increasing regularity: leaving the European Union on 29 March will be impossible. The legislation required will not get through parliament in time. It can’t be done. It won’t be done. An extension is now inevitable. But Theresa May is still insisting that it can and will be done, which it won’t be.

Brexit: the impossible in pursuit of the impossible, and the whole thing entirely pointless.