What is going on in Theresa May's head? Who knows – she's got no way of articulating it

As tediously enigmatic as she is psychosis-inducingly arrogant, the prime minister shares nothing other than false promises beyond her inner circle, or what remains of it

Whatever the sport, it’s a racing certainty that at a climactic moment of a finely balanced contest, some commentary box sage will trot out a variant on this fantastically original thought: “You just don’t have a clue what will happen next – and that’s why we love this game!”

With boxing, tennis, rugby, curling, hurling or crown green bowling, the knife-edge unknowability of the immediate future is a core component of its appeal. In the combat sport of politics, with a country toppling on the edge of history, it is de facto proof of criminal negligence at best, and wilful criminal recklessness at worst.

Whatever happens or happened in the Commons this or yesterday evening, depending on when you’re reading this, the most staggering element of this endlessly belief-bankrupting saga is that Theresa May has seen fit to sustain the dramatic tension until this 11th hour and 58th minute.

Even at the time of writing, some hours before the scheduled vote and shortly after attorney general Geoffrey Cox rang what looks at first glance like the death knell for the prime minister’s dream, it makes more sense to jot down six possible futures and throw the dice than attempt any reason-based clairvoyance.

In football, the match report is always dictated in reverse by the final score. When Manchester United played Bayern Munich in the 1999 Champions League final they were torn apart for 90 minutes. They went into added time trailing 0-1, when it should have been 0-3, and scored twice. A miraculous fluke was analysed as a triumph of heroic resilience.

No one doubts May’s resilience. But even if she lands the injury time miracle, there will have been nothing heroic about it.

The Brexitiest newspapers would spin it otherwise. To them, she’d be a flag-draped icon of inspired bulldoggery, an amalgam of Boadicea, Britannia, Thatcher and the Churchill of Dunkirk. But those papers are not impartial observers, and their first drafts of history tend towards the creative. Whatever the final result, however long this human barnacle clings to the ship of state, nothing will retroactively rewrite a truth so self-evident that it is embarrassing to restate. She has played an ultimate stakes game of chance with a country, if not a continent, for psychological reasons that remain unfathomable.

What is going on in her mind? After 30 months of asking, the question is as perplexing as ever. As tediously enigmatic as she is psychosis-inducingly arrogant, she shares nothing (beyond false promises) with anyone outside an inner circle, now shrunken to a couple of bunker loyalists. If she has any thoughts other than how to survive another week, she has no way of articulating them.

Perhaps when she writes her memoirs or has them written for her, we will learn more. But you seriously doubt that, and you’d want top-dollar danger money to read them, let alone write them.

If she tells herself it’s all been done from a sense of duty, well we all tell ourselves self-serving lies to get through the night. The politician’s capacity for self-delusion being unlimited, she may even believe it. But beyond the Arthur Askey husband, no one else does. Most of us with jackets that button at the front wouldn’t play suicide bomber dice with the jobs, education and health of millions.

Since it makes no odds to anything, you might as well hope she’s enjoying the melodrama, incongruous as it seems given that she is its source. Having the RAF jet waiting at Stansted on Monday with the engines running for the madcap last ditch flight to Strasbourg must have been an adrenaline kick.

It was cold and it rained, to borrow from Bowie, so maybe she felt like an actor – specifically Humphrey Bogart on the runway at the end of Casablanca when Rick seemed about to join Ilsa for the dash to freedom on the Lisbon plane. If so, she deceived herself: Rick was an idealist posing as a cynic, and sacrificed his shot at happy ever after with the love of his life for a higher cause. And she’s an arch cynic, willing to sacrifice literally everything other than the political power that is blatantly the love of hers.

In Casablanca, as the narrator intones at the start, they wait and wait and wait and wait. We know how that feels. The wait for a resolution to the self-mutilating chaos will go on for a while, whatever happens or doesn’t, or happened or didn’t, in the Commons tonight. The wait for an end to the rancour and division a consensual, realistic, more humble leader would at least have limited, will be longer. Babies born today will feel the aftershocks.

However this pans out, even if it ends in what the Daily Telegraph designates VE Day II, she has done this country immeasurable economic, psychological and reputational harm.

When David Cameron stood outside Number 10 that morning and quit, would anyone have believed that his immediate successor, having observed his folly from cradle to grave on the other side of the cabinet table, would follow his party-before-country, placate-the-nutters-at-any-cost template to challenge him for the title Worst PM EVER?