Theresa May has forgotten how to tell a blatant lie. It was the only skill she ever had

The prime minister’s final attempt to persuade MPs to vote for her deal was to ask them to do the opposite of what she herself has done

For decades, possibly centuries even, politicians have deliberately turned their big set-piece speeches into miniature farces because it is in their interest to do so.

In 2019, the key bits of any big speech are sent to the media the night before it is delivered. They appear on the front page of the newspapers, they are discussed on the breakfast TV and radio shows, all of which means that by the time the prime minister stands up and goes through the motions of reading out the words everyone has already read, the world has already moved on.

They do this because by sending out their preferred quotations and nothing else, they get to control the message. They are likely to be guaranteed at least one morning of the coverage they want. If the media are made to wait to see the speech in full, like the rest of the world is, it’s likely they won’t, to take one example, have a front page that reads, “Stop the infighting and do your duty, May warns cabinet”, as the Daily Mail did on 5 October 2017. But rather than focusing on that, instead, they’ll lead on, say, the fact that she took a P45 from a prankster, then lost her voice for half an hour, and then the set fell apart.

Occasionally however, this tactic can backfire with magnificent consequences. Sir Vince Cable’s party conference speech last year will be remembered for nothing more than the agonising wait for whether or not he really would say the words “erotic spasm”, the answer being that, no he would not, he would say the words “exotic spresm” instead.

All of which brings us on to the latest mindbending chapter in the now fully auto-parodic Brexit story, which took place in a pottery factory in Stoke on Monday morning.

We are now at the eleventh hour and roughly fifty-ninth minute of Theresa May’s attempts to save her Brexit deal before the vote finally takes place on Tuesday. For the last two and a half months, as the inevitability of its death has become overwhelming, she has singularly failed to come up with anything new to say about it. It delivers on the will of the British people. It respects the result of the referendum. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

And so, in the pre-released material sent out to journalists on Sunday night, a seemingly original point was made.

“On the rare occasions when parliament puts a question to the British people directly we have always understood that their response carries a profound significance,” it said she would say.

“When the people of Wales voted by a margin of 0.3 per cent, on a turnout of just over 50 per cent, to endorse the creation of the Welsh Assembly, that result was accepted by both sides and the popular legitimacy of that institution has never seriously been questioned.”

So it was unfortunate in the extreme that by the time she would come to deliver these words, a History MA student at Exeter University by the name of Joe Oliver had managed to look far enough into the Hansard website to reveal that, hang on, in 1997, after the referendum took place, a large number of Conservatives voted against the creation of the Welsh Assembly, and that one of them was, yes, that’s right, the prime minister herself. Among the others, who these days earn their crust issuing veiled threats about the damage to democracy that will come from a second Brexit referendum, are Iain Duncan Smith, Bill Cash, Bernard Jenkin and, for sheer delight, Welsh national anthem mouther John Redwood.

And then there’s the question of the 2005 Conservative election manifesto, which promises a second referendum on devolution in Wales, and on which May, the MP for Maidenhead, stood and was successfully elected.

This was, it should be made clear, May’s final roll of the dice, to command MPs to do as they were told. To warn them of the perils of defying democracy. And to do so she warned them not to do the very thing she did herself 22 years ago.

All of which meant that by the time these words were to pass her lips, they had been gently tweaked to the following:

“When the people of Wales voted by a margin of 0.3 per cent, on a turnout of just over 50 per cent, to endorse the creation of the Welsh Assembly, that result was accepted by parliament.

“Indeed we have never had a referendum in the United Kingdom that we have not honoured the result of.”

No longer a blatant falsehood then, just a little shimmy of the rhetorical hips, so as to not be struck down by her own big lie. Mainly though, it was simply an embarrassment. Close students of Westminster matters might have noticed this supposedly killer Welsh Assembly referendum argument had a touch of déjà vu about it. Indeed Sir Patrick McLoughlin made it at Prime Minister’s Questions on 12 December.

Back then, May called it a “very important point”. It may be that she decided then she would save it up for her own use later. And perhaps, if it had not come on a day when she might have been a touch distracted by the fact that her own MPs were voting on whether or not to remove her, she might have recalled her own actions back in 1997.

For Sir Patrick McLoughlin, who was Tory party chairman right up until the point that the Tory party came to take a view on his performance in organising the 2017 election campaign, one imagines the wait for a thank you from the prime minister for this latest intervention is ongoing.

Moments before she spoke, the European Union published a set of vague promises concerning the Irish backstop that represent May’s final push towards saving her deal. They stopped short of confirming, in writing, that the backstop would be time limited. Their reluctance, nay their refusal to do so, even though they know that if they did it might save their deal with the UK, tells you everything you need to know about how important they consider the potential permanence of the backstop to be.

She had hoped the letters might bring the likes of the Democratic Unionist Party round to backing her deal. Instead they said it confirmed, and indeed entrenched, their opposition to it.

Then, an hour later, one of her whips, a hitherto unknown man called Gareth Johnson, resigned, because he couldn’t bring himself to whip his MPs to vote for something he himself wanted to vote against.

These are mad, mad days. And the maddest phase of all hasn’t even begun.