At Brexit's current rate of expansion, Theresa May will be rescued by the end of the world

Brexit is growing at a rate of 200 per cent every two years. It will outlast humanity

Brexit has been in its “something will turn up phase” for some time now and possibly, at last, something has.

This is meant to be Theresa May’s “Hell Week”, with important post-Brexit proposals to be published in both Brussels and the UK, both of which will of course necessitate demented rows within her own party (current “strategies” include threatening to vote down the Budget), but Hell Week could hardly have got off to a better start.

The most sensible reading of Hell Week is that it looks likely to end with May agreeing to keep the UK in the EU’s customs union until 2022. In the circumstances, the prime minister will not have failed to notice that, according to this morning’s report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that is a mere eight years before all of the planet’s inbuilt life preserving systems are currently scheduled to turn against humanity in act of vengeance that will be swift and total.

To borrow briefly from the probability-based lexicon of the climate science community, let’s take a look at the likelihood of Brexit being concluded by then in any meaningful way.

Even in the unlikely event of Britain voting to leave the European Union, right up until around 8am on 24 June 2016, the latest point at which it was all meant to have been sorted out was 24 June 2018. But when David Cameron decided not to trigger the two-year Article 50 process “straight away” as he had consistently claimed he would, but resigned instead, that date was eventually pushed back by May to 29 March 2019, expanding Brexit by 37.5 per cent.

Then, in March 2018, the Brexit “transition period” was agreed to last until until 31 December 2020, and now, just seven months later, that deadline has been extended until the next general election in 2022, a further eighteen months.

At the most conservative estimate, that gives Brexit a rate of expansion of around two hundred per cent, or four years for every two.

If the depth to which it can be kicked into the long grass can be maintained on this exponential gradient, May has every reason to be optimistic that tornadoes of sulphuric gas will be moving freely over the Irish border long before she has to deliver any acceptable proposals for how to avoid the reintroduction of customs infrastructure across it.

By this point, when the waves are crashing over the top of Big Ben (shortly before the appropriate Commons committee is due to publish a white paper on whether or not to decamp to a nearby conference centre to allow for crucial refurbishment work), the number of Tory MPs who still think the gravest threat facing the country is the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice will have been reduced to a manageable minority, and disaster will have been averted. Brexit will not, strictly, have been Brexit, but May will nevertheless have made a success of it.

All of which does vaguely bring one to a serious point. If, as looks likely, the decision on how the UK does or does not stay within the EU’s customs union is delayed until 2022, will anyone care about it by then?

Some people will, of course, namely the small faction of the Conservative party that is pushing first May and secondly the country to the brink over it. But time is on their side for a limited time only. Jacob Rees-Mogg and his merry band of hard Brexiteers may be happy to insult their own intelligence and the country’s, waving about ridiculous “research” that suggests leaving the EU with no deal would boost the British economy by £1.1 trillion, but they know that time will not bear that conclusion out.

Brexit was, by and large, a vote taken by the older generation at the expense of the younger generation. The longer crucial decisions within it are delayed, the greater the leverage for their reversal.

It has always seemed abundantly obvious to me that the UK will rejoin the EU by 2025 or 2030 at the latest. Brexit supporters will simply die out, and young people just will not tolerate the sabotaging of their life chances in this way.

In the referendum of 2016, those who wanted to leave the EU knew that the only way they could make the case for leaving was to lie. The Remain campaign, led by David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn, never rose above a miserable shrug of the shoulders.

It will only take one decent leading politician to come along, at some point in the next decade, against the backdrop of growing economic pain, to make the overwhelmingly positive case for remaining in the EU, there’ll be a general election and that will be the end of it.

And by 2022, which by the end of this week may very well be the current deadline, that fight will be easier to win than ever.