The Brexit deal is dead, please stop trying to resuscitate this lifeless body and give us a Final Say

So that really should be that now for Theresa May’s Brexit deal, at least in its present formulation. Her four-month-long effort to win her Eurosceptic ERG and DUP critics round has finally failed

You can stop now, prime minister. The body can’t be resuscitated. The defibrillator you hoped that the guys in Brussels would send over urgently hasn’t arrived. Chopping the wounded, battered body in two has failed to bring it back to life. As Boris Johnson has said, the deal is dead.

Brexit, too, at least in its “hard” form, is dead. And what a day for it to fall off its perch: 29 March 2019. If they had managed to time the fatal vote for a few seconds before 11pm the ironies would have acquired an exquisite garnish. Still, it is a delicious moment.

So that really should be that now for Theresa May’s Brexit deal, at least in its present formulation. Her four-month-long effort to win her Eurosceptic ERG and DUP critics round has finally failed. She has learned, the hard, way they cannot be appeased; and that the invisible border on the Irish border is so important to the DUP, as is having the exact same status as the rest of the UK, that they are happy to live with staying in the EU for as long as it takes to solve the border problem via technological arrangements.

Is that not obvious?

The DUP are not simply orange Brexiteers. Most important, they are famously patient, stubborn people – even more bloody difficult than May. They’ve been through worse than this.

May cannot carry her deal in its current form. It needs change, and change that will attract substantial support from across the rest of the Commons that is the opposition parties. She could, weeks ago, have carried her deal if she had made its final approval dependent on a vote of the people. It would easily have enjoyed a three-figure majority. She might even have won. That option, in fact, is still open to her. It is now the last possible way for her to achieve the Brexit she has negotiated and fought so very hard for.

The other evening she made a broadcast in which she appealed over the heads of MPs to the public – “I’m on your side.” Well, if she is, and they are on her side, then all she needs to do is to take her case to the country, in a final rebuke to her rebellious parliamentary colleagues.

In any case, we need to move on. Fortunately some of our MPs are taking their responsibilities seriously, and moving towards something like a consensus about the way forward. Two things – complementary in fact – seem to be emerging from the spitballing of our elected representatives. First, a closer economic relationship with the EU that includes membership of the customs union – something that we agreed to in 1972 as the “economic club” we thought we’d joined.

Second, the need for a Final Say referendum on whatever deal emerges from the current imbroglio.

We could, then, have a referendum based on a choice between Remain; Leave on “soft Brexit” terms; or Leave on WTO terms. That would allow a sovereign people to choose between three realistic options that are acceptable to the EU. If the prime minister had any sense – and her judgment seems to have become increasingly erratic – she should indeed have the courage to put her deal to the people.

Then again, the prime minister herself may not be around for much longer. She promised to quit as soon as Brexit became effective in May – but it seems very unlikely that there is any way that can happen now. Given everything, it would be even more chaotic to have a Conservative leadership election in the middle of this crisis and it would in any case solve nothing.

We also know we cannot crash out of the EU on 12 April, because parliament has ruled it out overwhelmingly. That leaves only one reaming path to stability. May must go to the EU and explain that she needs the time to form a consensus in the Commons (and not her own party). If they give us a year – “a year for Britain” – then she can leave her successor to take the task forward, towards the Final Say referendum. A year should be sufficient for the Tories to elect a new leader, for that new PM to amend the deal, and for them to put it to the people.

Thus far we have run Brexit in reverse. Not all of the effort has been wasted – but we really do need to start again.