David Davis has now not-resigned five times over Brexit – how long can this toddler tantrum politics go on?

If you’d made the same false promises to the country as the Brexit secretary has, and had been hopelessly found out, would you not just threaten to resign but actually do it?

It was specifically over the time limiting of the Northern Irish customs backstop option that David Davis didn’t resign – this time. That takes his total of Brexit non-resignations (at time of writing) to five.

Davis has long liked to present himself to anyone prepared to listen, or merely walking past, as the great Action Man of politics, and as such we hope it might be possible for the next inevitable superhero crossover movie to incorporate Davis as a central character.

When superhuman strength has proved of no use in defeating The Enemy, when the manipulation of magnetic fields has not been able to bend the tide of the battle in your favour; when sonic screams, telepathy and astral projection have all come to nothing, there is only one option remaining. Enter Davis.

The camera pulls back, the spectacles are lowered to the end of the nose, the neck is lowered. Journalists close to The Enemy receive a group WhatsApp message about Davis “prepared to resign” if he doesn’t cede to his demands, and in a flash the world is saved.

Above a rousing string chorus, an unmistakeable asinine chuckle is heard.

There are flaws in the dramatic premise, of course. If we take a gentle jog through Davis’s four other Brexit non-resignations, an unfortunate truth reveals itself, which is that every last thing he has threatened to resign over has happened anyway, and he has nonetheless remained in post.

They include not resigning over Boris Johnson and Michael Gove getting more attention than him on Brexit, not resigning over Damian Green not watching porn on his office computer, not resigning over Britain not leaving the EU’s common fisheries policy, not resigning over not being listened to about not pursuing a “customs partnership” with the EU.

It must be hard being David Davis. Brexit is just not going the way he wants it to. By now, according to Davis’s own pronouncements on the matter, mainly from 2016, Britain should have already struck separate free trade deals with Germany, France and Poland.

It should also have successfully negotiated free trade deals with the USA, China, India, the UAE and Indonesia, which would together combine to make a free trade area “ten times larger” than the EU – which, in GDP terms, would be significantly larger than Planet Earth.

If they were the promises you’d made to the country, and absolutely none of them had happened, and all of them had been shown very obviously to be total rubbish... wouldn’t you not just threaten to resign, but actually go through with it? Of course you would. But that’s why you’re not David Davis.

Take a look back at modern political history, and the conclusion seems unavoidable that when, say Sir Robin Cook, or Geoffrey Howe, resigned from the government over a point of high principle, the subsequent lionisation of their decision is helped by the fact they had not threatened to resign five or more times before actually doing so. Prior to that point, they had actually, you know, been doing a good and useful job in government.

That Davis’s little lunchtime standoff with Theresa May has ended with both sides able to claim victory is the main thing that matters, in this new realm of toddler politics which has been inflicted on us.

At the end of a dramatic 24 hours – though whether its drama was even remotely felt anywhere other than within a 100-yard radius of Big Ben is a matter of quite some debate – we are now in a position where David Davis has forced the prime minister into agreeing to a negotiating position that both know the European Union will reject instantly.

In fact, via the European Parliament’s Brexit coordinator Guy Verhofstadt who called the proposals “unworkable”, it essentially already has done.

Again, one reaches for the metaphors to describe the Conservatives attempting to negotiate Brexit, and one finds only the Conservatives attempting to negotiate Brexit.

Piss-ups in breweries present all kinds of entirely legitimate logistical problems. For those unfamiliar with the banjo, a cow’s arse is an intimidating target.

In trying to explain the latest developments in the Greatest, Most Spectacular, Most Pyrotechnic, Champagne Super Cluster Shambles Of Them All, the word “like” is of precious little use.

We are now fully two years on from the referendum, and the government still has no meaningful plan or position on what it wants or thinks it can achieve.

It creeps at a snail’s pace, like a train pulling into its final destination, towards whatever Brussels is prepared to give it. Whatever passengers are on board when it gets there, whatever fights have broken out, whoever has threatened to leap from the windows but ultimately decided to have a bit of a nap instead, is of no great consequence.

And if you don’t believe that, well, I’d threaten to resign if I were you.