Theresa May is going round the country 'selling Brexit' – has she forgotten what happened the last time she tried this?

The Eurosceptic movement has for decades centred its attack strategy on the ‘bureaucrats in Brussels’, and Brussels has rejected the UK’s plan for Brexit on the basis that it involves extra bureaucracy. That would in ordinary times seem farcical

Theresa May’s summer of “selling Brexit” began on Monday morning with a public Q and A in a factory in Gateshead, and you need only have a political memory slightly longer than a goldfish to know how this story ends.

In April last year, Theresa May had a 20-point lead in the opinion polls and was regularly being described as the “most popular prime minister of all time”.

Then, somewhat memorably, she called a general election. She went on a tour around the country, meeting and taking questions from members of the public, and the public decided that, actually, it appeared that she was quite, quite mad, and decided to take her majority away and made her life impossible.

So exactly what she hopes to achieve by doing the same thing again is a mystery to which someone, somewhere must presumably know the answer.

Cultural history offers no ready cliche for a mesmerically unimpressive travelling salesman, going from town to town, selling something that’s already well-known to be broken beyond repair. This is because, it is probably safe to assume, no one has yet been daft enough to try it.

Theresa May’s “Chequers agreement”, the thing which she will spend the summer selling to the country, only actually has one potential customer, and that is the European Union.

That customer could not have been more unambiguous about the fact that it will not buy it. The chief problem with it concerns the Irish border. The UK will not countenance the EU’s solution, which would, as a last resort, keep Northern Ireland within the single market and customs union, and require a de facto border in the Irish Sea. And it would scarcely be a last resort, because no other resorts have been suggested, and there’s been years to think about it.

Theresa May’s alternative is a plan that is impressive in its ingenuity, involving keeping the customs border in Ireland wide open, and having the UK collect the EU’s duties for it, and vice versa. But the EU has already said no, for many reasons, one of which being the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, making it clear on Friday that “Brexit cannot be responsible for additional bureaucracy”, which this plan certainly would.

That the Eurosceptic movement has for decades centred its attack strategy on the “bureaucrats in Brussels”, and Brussels has rejected the UK’s plan for Brexit on the basis that it involves extra bureaucracy that it will not do, would in ordinary times seem farcical, but that barely registers a tremor on the Brexit Banter scale these days.

The new foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt will spend the summer travelling to all 27 EU capitals to try to talk them round to this plan. The fact that David Cameron did exactly the same two years ago, then extracted from the EU in his “renegotiations” a series of concessions that were so demolished in the pro-Brexit media as to quite possibly ultimately sway the referendum in the wrong direction, is a lesson that he, too, appears incapable of learning.

Britain has tried before to prise open gaps between the 27 EU countries. It never works. It is the whole reason the “negotiations” with the EU are not actually negotiations at all. Barnier is an administrator, not a negotiator. He is not mandated to make concessions, only to follow the instructions issued to him.

So what is the point of all this? Brexit stands ready to fall apart, not that it was anything other than pre-collapsed on arrival. Does May imagine that getting the British public on board with the Chequers plan increases her leverage in Brussels? She has no leverage. Barnier is not mandated to care how much Britain likes the plan that doesn’t work.

Can Hunt singlehandedly compel the 27, via their central governments, to take up a new approach? It has never happened before.

Rather, as all the promises stand to be broken, as anything that was ever meant to be remotely good or worthwhile about Brexit stands ready to collapse, rather it is a final opportunity to pre-apportion blame. To be able to say, “We did our best but they wouldn’t listen”, before the instantly foreseeable future makes landfall.

May’s real problem, however, is that the public has never listened to her before, and won’t do now.