Theresa May has moved on from losing meaningful votes to writing meaningless letters

It is 22 years since the satirist Chris Morris convinced Southend MP David Amess to raise in the House of Commons the dangers of a new but entirely fictitious drug called cake.

One of cake’s side effects, according to no less than Noel Edmonds, was that it “stimulates a part of the brain known as Shatner’s bassoon, which deals with time perception”.

Cake, Edmonds earnestly believed, “can make a second feel like a month. Sounds like fun, but not funny for the Prague schoolboy who stepped in front of a tram, thinking he had a month to cross the street.”

And yet, 22 years or perhaps 22 seconds later, cake really has hit the streets, except it is now known as Brexit.

Theresa May has the nation’s Shatner’s Bassoon in her grasp and she is wreaking merry havoc.

If I type into Google such things as Article 50 extension, I can see in front of me clear evidence that, just a fortnight ago, May wrote to Donald Tusk and asked for the Article 50 deadline to be extended to 30 June. I can see well-briefed Brussels correspondents, saying that Jean-Claude Juncker and others advised her against doing it, because they would have to say no.

I can also see pictures and video clips of all the leaders of the 27 EU nations, meeting in Brussels, and telling May that the deadline was 12 April. And by then she would have to have either passed the withdrawal agreement through the House of Commons, or come up with a credible plan, with Commons support, for a new way forward.

Next week, all those leaders will have to come back to Brussels again, entirely against their will. They will have read May’s letter, which, and I know we’re all off our tits on Brexit here, really does appear to have Friday 5 April written at the top of it, in which she says that the House of Commons hasn’t passed the withdrawal agreement, she doesn’t have anything like a coherent plan with Commons support for the way ahead, but could she please extend the deadline to 30 June.

She also says the UK could take part in the EU elections on 22 May, though hopefully the elected MEPs may never take their seats, or they will withdraw from the parliament the moment a deal is reached.

On the increasingly common occasions over the last couple of years in which May is called mad or worse for triggering Article 50 in March 2017 without any real plan on how to deliver Brexit, one defence of her actions is regularly overlooked.

She was under considerable pressure, from Brexiteers at home and from European leaders, to trigger Article 50 as soon as possible. The EU had held firm, it had not allowed any kind of pre-negotiation. Goodwill was evaporating. And there was the fact that the good friend and neighbour that the UK wished to be wouldn’t wish to turn the EU’s parliamentary elections in May 2019 into something of a circus act.

It is the very thing it is now doing. The EU has a parliament like any other. It has parties and groupings from different countries. The overall size of the number of MEPs that sit in it is important. Try to imagine a British general election, the deals that are done after it (in two of the three most recent examples), in which a whole large chunk of MPs may or may not vanish at an indiscernible point in the future.

At this point in the process, the sanest voices are the ones calling for self-harm. The French foreign minister has said no, the UK shouldn’t be allowed any extension. In failing to reach an agreement with itself, it has chosen a disorderly exit. With the exception of Ireland and the UK itself, France has the most chaos to manage from a chaotic British departure. It takes the view that chaos is better than allowing Europe to be infected with British psychosis.

What May hopes, of course, is that when the EU says no, which it already has done, and offers a long extension instead, her accepting it can be blamed on a combination of both the EU and Jeremy Corbyn, who she has now had three days of “talks” with, which have no purpose beyond both sides outwardly showing they are having them.

It is yet another clear demonstration of May as quite possible the least politically skilled prime minister this country has ever had. Her manoeuvres are so transparent as to not be manoeuvres at all. This playing for position is so crass it insults the basic intelligence of both her political interlocutors and her would-be voters.

Corbyn is simply not going to carry the can for the failure of Brexit. Not least as he has never cared about its consequences anyway. He, unlike her, actually is a Brexiteer. And in any event, harm only hastens her departure.

And so we must wait for the worst, most dismal Groundhog Day episode yet, in Brussels next week, when yet again, nothing will have changed. There remains a chance that, via French president Emmanuel Macron, the spell might be broken in the most frightening way possible. But it is only a chance.

We go on to the end. The next phase: European elections that will be almost as grim a spectacle as another referendum; a conservative leadership election, no doubt; probably a general election, but underpinning it all, a withdrawal agreement that the EU will demand the House of Commons ratify, and the House of Commons will refuse to do so.

Seconds, days, months, weeks, years. Who knows? Who cares? They’re all the same.