Theresa May is reduced to begging someone - anyone - to take back control from her, but nobody will

The briefest flash of the ankle of power, and Boris Johnson's principles left him as fast as one of his families

Where can you even start? What can you possibly say? Farce doesn’t do it justice. It has too many layers, too many faces for that. In the House of Commons on Wednesday morning, afternoon and late into the night, Inception crashed into Fawlty Towers at such high speed they carried the nation into a new dimension of the ridiculous.

If the guy who wrote House of Cards had been there, he’d have laughed at the sheer preposterousness of it all. Which, naturally, he was. As Theresa May wandered into a grand committee room in the bowels of the Palace of Westminster, to offer her own party her own political suicide as a way of keeping her political dignity on life support for another twenty four hours, there was Michael, or more accurately, Lord, Dobbs, joking that he was “auditioning for his next series,” to anyone who’d listen.

What he saw was not so much a House of Cards as a great Tower of Bullshit, falling suddenly away under the gentlest of nudges and smothering everyone inside under its deathly weight.

“You’re tired. You want this to end.” They were the words with which the Prime Minister tried to hypno-bully the country and the nation into supporting her, just a week ago. Well it turns out, no. They don’t want it to end. On this “day of history”, the day that “parliament took back control” of Brexit, parliament found out just as quick as everybody else who’s ever been anywhere near it, that they don’t actually want control of it at all.

That, at the end, of six hours debate and two hours of voting, Westminster’s 650 MPs rejected every single one of the eight ways out of Brexit that had been put before them, is the climax to which we will return later.

Before then, came Theresa May’s last roll of the dice, which was to fire the gun on the Tory leadership contest, mainly in the hope that it might prove enough of a distraction that her MPs might pass her deal, almost by accident.

It was in its way, a Sixth Sense style plot twist. With Theresa May’s conditional offer of resignation, nothing actually changed, other than to show in startling clarity what had been there all along. Brexit was never about Brexit. It was, is, now and ever shall be, the 10,000 mile an hour clown car vehicle for the latest Tory party power struggle. And this was the moment a naive nation looked suddenly into Bruce Willis’s eyes. I see shit people.

You do indeed, and none more so than Boris Johnson, who confronted with only the briefest flash of the ankle of power, found his principles yet again walking out on him as fast as one of his families.

For anyone even a fraction less shameful, which is to say the rest of the human race in its entirety, it might be just a tiny bit awkward if all you’ve been doing for the last year is writing the same newspaper column over and over again, finding new, exciting and ideally Latin ways to say how terrible Theresa May’s deal is. And then, when it looks like backing it might steal you a couple of inches in the march to 10 Downing Street, you don’t even hesitate for so much as a nanosecond.

Quite bizarrely, when, at around, 6pm, he told a meeting of the European Research Group that, you know, that’s me done lads, thanks for the research eh, some of them seemed surprised. Jacob Rees-Mogg had already backed the deal by this point, deciding via a column in the morning’s Daily Mail that a UK reduced to what he had recently called a “slave state” was where he wanted to live after all.

Mark Francois slammed a door. Steve Baker told them all he was “so angry he could bulldoze the whole place into the river”. Poor mites. For the bigger boys, it had always been a little game. But no one told the little ones. They really believed.

As Boris Johnson emerged, his friends, his beliefs but never himself sold out yet again, and a journalist shouted at him: “Boris, have you just put the UK in a suicide vest and handed Michel Barnier the trigger?”

This, you see, is one of around a hundred such hilarious descriptions of the deal he now supports, written by one Boris Johnson in the Daily Telegraph, when having resigned as foreign secretary (over the deal he now backs, obviously) he found himself with nothing better to do than return to life of a columnist, with a carefully honed specialism in castigating the achievements of an astonishingly bad government of which he had been by some margin the worst member.

Not that any of it is going to matter. For the early signs are that Theresa May, in a rare synergy of both her invincibility and performance art levels of incompetence, may very well have tried to end her political career, but failed.

“Back my deal and I’ll stand down.” They were the clear instructions. Not so much a “back me or sack me” plea as a back me then sack me. But they’ve refused to sack her. At around 9pm, the Democratic Unionist Party decided they couldn’t back the deal. The numbers she needed were never going to be there. And, in any case, in the House of Commons, Speaker Bercow had already made abundantly clear that he’s got no intention of allowing a third vote on her withdrawal deal, and unless that changes, even her own self-inflicted end appears to be off limits.

I have written many times that Theresa May has ascended to the superhero level. She is immortal. She cannot be defeated. She always finds a way to survive. But rare, perhaps non-existent are the comic book characters invincible even to their own powers. Here was Theresa the Terminator, descending into the open flames and still not melting.

In the meantime, as Tories marched in and out of committee rooms, another six hours of Brexit debate rattled around the Commons. The “historic” indicative votes took place and every single option was rejected. No to a second referendum, no to a customs union, no to revoking Article 50, no to no deal, no to unicorns, no to everything.

The only way out of the mess, now is to vote for Theresa May’s deal in a vote the speaker won’t let her hold. Nothing, in its own terrifying way, has changed. Nothing ever will. Nothing ever can. A nation buried alive by Brexit.