Theresa May is moving through the five stages of Brexit grief – but they are all denial

The prime minister told the House of Commons that her approach ‘had to change’, which means, of course that nothing has

Since the most recent of the many deaths of Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement, the five stages of grief have been clear to see: denial, denial, denial, denial and denial. At the despatch box of the House of Commons on Monday afternoon, it was clear to see the prime minister was finally advancing from stage one to two.

In case you’ve forgotten, her withdrawal agreement first died the moment the details of it were made public, in November, and the DUP and various Brexiteers said they couldn’t possibly support it. Then it died again when several members of the cabinet resigned over it. It died again shortly after that because she had to cancel the “meaningful vote” on it in the House of Commons. When she did that, she said she’d go to Brussels and get some concessions on the backstop. It died the day after that when her own MPs tried to topple her.

The next day it died again when not only did she not get any concessions from Brussels, the meaningless ones they had tentatively agreed to give her in advance of the summit, they actually removed them from the resolutions at the end.

It died again last week when she finally had to put it before the House of Commons to be voted on, despite it being identical to the version she had withdrawn because she knew she would lose.

Then, when it was actually voted on, it died again, and this was the most severe death of them all – when it was rejected by 432 votes to 202.

That death was meant to be its last death. But it appears Ms May thinks it is still alive. When she appeared in the House of Commons on Monday afternoon, to set out her plan B, now that plan A had died a 14th time, it was clear plan B would involve carrying on with plan A as if absolutely nothing had happened.

“Following last week’s vote, it is clear that the government’s approach had to change,” she breezily informed parliament. Over the next 20 minutes or so, it would become clear that nothing, in fact, has changed. Indeed, the most certain way of knowing that nothing had changed was Theresa May claiming something had. Traditionally, everything changes and Theresa May says nothing has. So when she says it is clear that something has to change, you can be certain that nothing has.

She would, she said, “talk to the DUP” to find ways of tweaking the Irish backstop arrangements. At all of her deal’s various deaths over the last two months, she has made abundantly clear that her deal “is the only deal” and that “there is no deal without a backstop”. The EU, meanwhile, could not have been clearer that the deal cannot be renegotiated.

If the backstop could be renegotiated, one has to imagine Theresa May would have attempted to have done so to prevent any or indeed all of the deaths of her deal that had occurred before now.

She had, she said, held cross-party talks with various colleagues, and was disappointed that the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had declined her invitation. But everyone who has taken the trouble to meet with her has found that her red lines, on leaving the customs union, on not extending Article 50, on no second referendum, remain as red and as rigid as ever. So the point of going to meet her is not clear to see. She wants only to spread the stench of death around her deal on to the other parties. To establish a phony cross-party consensus to share the load for her own failings.

She explained, yet again, how none of the alternative options were, in her opinion, acceptable. A second referendum could “damage social cohesion by undermining our faith in democracy”, she said, and in so doing copied the denuded cowardice of Chris Grayling, which is to obliquely stoke fear of what the far right might do if they don’t get the damaging outcomes they seek, now that we have pandered to them for so long.

Jeremy Corbyn rose to tell her “it is becoming like Groundhog Day”, before demanding that she “take no deal off the table” for what feels like the 10,000th day in a row, all the while reading from a script that took into account not a whisper of anything the prime minister had just been saying.

Rarely can the House of Commons have felt more like a vacuum of ideas and a vacuum of leadership. Of the various ways out of the mess, a general election is becoming to feel the most likely. But neither May nor Corbyn are offering anything on Brexit that waves a bat anywhere in the direction of reality. Who or what they would expect the public to bother getting out of the house to vote for is a mystery. All that can be known for certain is that Theresa May’s deal will die again in the very near future. Who knows, maybe then she’ll finally make it all the way to denial.