There was the Prime Minister, just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to smash up his party so she didn't have to smash up hers

This wasn't party before country, it was party before party, and one of the parties wasn't even hers

“And don’t forget,” the prime minister said, lowering her head but angling up her eyes to meet the barrel of the camera. “I’m also just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to smash up his party, so I don’t have to smash up mine.”

Well, they weren’t the exact words but 1,015 miserable days and seven more miserable hours later, this is what it came down to. This was Theresa: The Unstoppable Woman’s latest way out. Sorry Jezza. I can’t deliver Brexit and keep my party together, so you’ll have to deliver it for me. And if it breaks your party instead, well, what can I say? Sorry. I’m a Tory. That’s what we do.

The pundits have been braced for the prime minister putting party before country for some time. That was always going to happen, but not like this. This was party before party and one of them wasn’t even hers.

She’d started the day by locking the cabinet in the cabinet room and keeping them there all morning, all afternoon and into the evening. At 2pm, we are told, they were led like restless whippets out into the Downing Street garden for a walkabout. When they’d finally agreed to the Dial J for Jeremy plan, they were again detained, kept away from their phones and provided with alcohol while Theresa May and her team came up with a way of selling this latest insanity to the nation.

And, this the Notting Hill style ending, is what they came up with, with the obvious caveat that it’s clearly not going to end the way they hope.

The Tories were true to their Peter Pan spirit. The Party That Never Grows Up could not find its way to a compromise, because that would involve some of them having to admit that the fantasy they had sold to the nation three years ago could never be delivered.

So she took the only option available to her. “No deal” was rejected, yet again, though only in words. In reality, it remains right there, the high-speed steam train expanding on the horizon.

But she’d be asking the EU for a long extension that she hoped was a short one and which they may or may not accept, and then inviting Jeremy Corbyn to help her find a way to get Brexit over the line.

Come on Jezza. Can’t do it without you. If it had a hint of deja vu about it, that’s because it always does. There are no scenes left in Brexit: The Neverending Story that haven’t come round three times or more.

It’s barely two months since she last asked for Jeremy Corbyn’s help to get Brexit over the line. On that day she also had the small matter of a no confidence motion against her, and so she had leaned over the despatch box and called him “a national tragedy”. She’d also told some fun anecdotes about various terrorists he had invited into the House of Commons over the years. Unsurprisingly, their cross party meetings turned out to be a waste of time.

Many unanswered questions spring to mind. She knows as well as he knows that Labour’s Brexit plan won’t survive a second in contact with actual daylight. “Permanent customs union”...“strong single market deal”... these were never actual proposals, just positions to hold David Davis to account for his constant lies. And what do you know, now Theresa May is latching on to them as actual government policy. But they were never real.

She knows this, surely. Is it too cynical to say it was just an attempt to position Labour to take the blame for the hell of no deal when this Potemkin Brexit plan falls apart? We reached out to them but they would not help. With anyone but Theresa May, it would be.

Where we go from here, who knows. Pretend politics, pretend policies, and pretend time to do it all in.

Theresa May might – just – have done her bit to stop her party breaking. And on the evidence of the last few months, Corbyn and his team are far too canny to allow Brexit to break theirs either.

Something has to give, to get us through, something has to break. The most likely candidate, as of now, is the country. And that suits both of them just fine.