Theresa May and her team have gone well beyond amateur incompetence now

Who could have guessed that the famously laissez-faire DUP would end up being difficult to deal with? Not May, David Davis or Boris Johnson, that's for sure

It would be nice to have a PM who didn’t make Britain look so bumblingly idiotic (Sky News)

With any political megafiasco, there comes a moment when the mind finds it too hard to compute such levels of incompetence, and tries to picture it instead as part of some cunning plan.

With Theresa May’s humiliation yesterday, the moment came early. And then it went.

A few wise voices are still sourcing the collapse of the proto-Brexit deal to premeditated posturing, designed to let the DUP claim it fought the unionist corner bravely before consenting to a compromise later this week.

But the chant directed at May by the crowd is borrowed from fans of pitiably struggling football teams: you don’t know what you’re doing.

Small surprise there. For over a year, the Government’s handling of Brexit has reminded us of England teams in recent tournaments. The ones featuring players who, although supposedly top-class professionals, appear to have been randomly selected by computer from the national insurance database of every British 18-35-year-old male, given an hour’s training in a game they never played before and a 90-second lecture on tactics they couldn’t begin to understand, and sent out to represent their country as part of some unusually cretinous reality TV show / pop psychology experiment.

You could no more expect them to compete against Germany, Brazil or mighty Iceland than you would expect the Prime Minister and her allies to hold their own against Michel Barnier, Donald Tusk and the mighty DUP.

Everyone loves the dream of the plucky amateur defying incalculable odds. It’s what created the FA Cup’s golden age back in the 1970s, when every other year, non-league part-timers – plasterers, postmen, carpenters, and so on – miraculously beat a First Division giant. It’s why Sylvester Stallone’s fantasy of a Philadelphia abbatoir worker fighting a Mohammed Ali-esque world champ to a standstill won the Oscar for Best Picture.

But however strong the nostalgic lure of a time when amateurishness was a badge of honour rather than an insult, the Brexit negotiations make a curious arena for a government revival of the Corinthian spirit.

And yet, with the deadline imminent for pre-EU trade talks agreement on the crucial issues, here we are without one.

In May’s defence, she is unlucky that modern history offers no guide about any Unionist tendency towards intransigence. If only they had a well-known anthem about not surrendering, or their MPs still cleaved to the faith that God created the world from scratch a few thousand years ago. Had any such warning been available, May might not have taken their gracious consent for granted.

As it was, bless her heart, she saw no need to bank the DUP’s agreement in advance of striking that deal. Apparently, in the cause of boggling the mind, she didn’t even show Arlene Foster the text she later wasted no time in rejecting.

Perhaps May assumed that she had bribed them to prop up her minority Government with so much gold that they would merrily welcome the effective redefinition of Northern Ireland, in border and customs terms, as part of a united Ireland – and the apparent necessity of creating a new border with the rest of the UK. Maybe she thought serving a slice of anathema as a fait accompli would bounce the DUP into acceptance.

Or perhaps May was just stumbling blindly forward in denial of the fact that there is no obvious solution to the conundrum of how Northern Ireland could leave the single market and customs union without border controls, with the Republic being restored.

If there is no solution at all, as former top Foreign Office mandarin Peter Ricketts suggested on his morning’s Today programme (“There are too many incompatible objectives jostling here,” he said in perfect Whitehallese), on one level you can sympathise with May for adopting the ostrich position. It’s only human to want to shield one’s eyes from an utterly hideous sight.

On another level, without wishing to seem greedy, it would be nice to have a PM who didn’t make Britain look so bumblingly idiotic in the unshielded eyes of the world. Apart from anything, isn’t that the Foreign Secretary’s job?

Who knows? May might yet salvage a deal with one of those studiedly ambiguous, all-things-to-all-sides statements – built on shifting sands, and so likely to sink within weeks – that the DUP could accept.

But even if she can, and she stands at a lectern in Brussels late this week claiming victory with a straightish face, she has inflicted more damage on herself.

No doubt she’ll survive it. Her short-term hold on office might even be strengthened, as it is whenever a sharpened focus on the horror of the job deters everyone else from wanting it.

But you don’t bolster what minimal authority you have, or firm up such a weak negotiating position, by walking into a sucker punch so plainly telegraphed from so far out that Rocky Balboa would have dodged it with insouciant ease.

Theresa May is no Rocky, even if they are rumoured to use the same speech coach. She isn’t even one of those England penalty-takers who couldn’t hope to find the net if the opposition keeper nipped behind the posts for a fag before he ran up to the spot.

In terms of amateur-hour cluelessness, she has soared into the stratosphere. She is Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards, comically outclassed by even the weakest competition – and invariably falling a very long way short.