Hearing Theresa May stamp her foot like a toddler over Brexit almost made me feel sorry for her – then I remembered

There is nothing so inflexible as refusing to acknowledge the truth

Theresa May updated the Commons on Brexit, for the first time since her disastrous conference speech (PA)

“Be flexible. Be imaginative. Be creative,” Theresa May told EU leaders via the House of Commons.

For some time I’ve had a nagging doubt about quite who it is the Prime Minister reminds me of, both on Monday and in Florence, as she moves with due desperation over the tipping point from negotiating to begging.

I have now realised with blessed relief who it is: my nephew at bedtime.

Every day, at around half past seven, he is told it is time to go to bed. And every day, like Theresa May, he proposes a range of radical and imaginative alternatives to bedtime. Every day, you will not be surprised to learn, he goes to bed.

It is always clarifying, in the complex world of Brexit, to view developments through the prism of the UK as toddler, the EU as grownup, and never more so than now.

“The ball’s in the EU’s court,” she told the Commons today. It is exactly the kind of idiom you might expect the average four-year-old to pick up.

“It’s bedtime.”

“I’m not going to bed.”

“It’s. Bed. Time.”

“The ball’s in your court.”

Not once in more than a year has the EU deviated from its position on Brexit - that it will involve pain for us, and pain for them - arguably most articulately set out by Donald Tusk last year. “There are no cakes on the table,” he said. “Only salt and vinegar.”

Now, a year on, with the negotiations still seemingly close to deadlock, Theresa May again pleads for “flexibility” from EU leaders.

This builds on countless comments of recent weeks, from David Davis and others. That the EU must be “more imaginative, more creative.”

But it doesn’t want to, it can’t, and why should it?

The UK has been told it is 10 minutes til bedtime. Now it is telling Daddy to be more flexible, more creative, to come up with new and imaginative solutions, that the ball is in its court.

Don’t be under any illusions. The UK is going to bed. The UK might burn with injustice. It might wonder why Daddy could be so spiteful. It may yet start screaming and crying and stamping its feet. It doesn’t even have school in the morning. Why can’t it just watch the end of the film? If it can stay up now it promises to go to bed early every day for the next week.

But the UK is going to bed.

If you are prepared to overlook the fact that she is a cowardly, shameless schemer who wouldn’t even take part in the referendum campaign for reasons of career advancement, it might be possible to feel sorry for Theresa May (though you shouldn’t do either thing).

She didn’t tell any of the outright lies that are now exploding on the path in front of her.

It was Nigel Farage and David Davis who stared down any TV camera that was willing to point at them, claiming that, for example, the German car industry wouldn’t allow Angela Merkel to let Britain leave with no deal. Now confederations of German business are telling their members to “prepare for a very hard Brexit.”

It wasn’t her that trotted out the transparently obvious nonsense about the EU “needing us more than we need them”, now shown to be utterly false.

She isn’t one of the deranged lunatics who thinks there is no one alive whose life and livelihood isn’t worth smashing to smithereens on the altar of parliamentary sovereignty.

She doesn’t think her country’s dignity isn’t worth setting fire to in the pursuit of some bizarre niche interest.

It’s merely that she decided she wanted to do it.

We will wait and see what flexibility, what creativity and imagination the EU countries show. But to them, it's pretty clear: the inflexibility is on the UK’s part. There is nothing so inflexible as refusing to acknowledge the truth - that there are no imaginative or creative solutions to be found.

The EU reconciled itself long ago to the small amount of salt and vinegar it would have to swallow. We are just going through the motions before the UK finishes off the bottle.