Theresa May didn't like being called ‘nebulous’? She has turned nebulousness into an art form

‘Vague, ill-defined, ambiguous, muddy, opaque’ are the most popular synonyms for ‘nebulous’. Do those words, as someone once said, remind you of anybody?

It took the beak readers several hours to work out exactly what Theresa May had been saying, when she narrowed her sparrow eyes and stared with terrifying singularity into the damp soul of Jean-Claude Juncker.

And when the beak readers did, Google analytics reported a sudden surge in searches for the meaning of the word “nebulous”.

“You called me nebulous,” she had said. And he, roughly twelve hours after he had stood behind a lectern in front of a bank of live television cameras and called her nebulous, replied, “No I didn’t”.

We can only conclude that Mr Juncker, evidently like so many others, doesn’t quite know what nebulous means.

Because if he’d seen the same google search results as everybody else, there’s frankly no way he would have dared deny it.

“Vague, ill-defined, ambiguous,” are, it turns out, the most popular synonyms for this term Theresa May was so furious to have had attached to her. Do these words, as someone once said, “remind you of anybody?”

This, lest there be even the tiniest chance we forget, is a woman, who, for a full year after becoming prime minister is rumoured to have ordered from waiters in restaurants with the words “Brexit means Brexit.”

Forty-eight hours ago, she was asked how she was intending to vote in a vote of confidence in herself, and refused to answer. And yet here she was, in a meeting of world leaders scarcely able to control her rage at the idea someone had dared to suggest she had been in any way – hang on, here are a few more – “unclear, opaque, indefinite”.

Oh Brexit, where would we be without you? At least that’s not something we’ll have to worry about for the next 40 years.

The defence Mr Juncker was seeking to make, by the way, was that he hadn’t actually called her “nebulous”. When he’d said the words, he was talking about the “UK generally” being unclear what it wants from Brexit, which given it is an issue too toxic to even put before parliament, is not necessarily all that outrageous. And when you consider that most analysts currently attach roughly equal likelihood to the UK leaving the EU in 105 days with absolutely no deal whatsoever, or, via second referendum, not even leaving at all, well “nebulous” is a rather gentle way of putting it.

Already Theresa May’s 48-hour Brussels disaster, the cacophonic coda at the end of a week of unprecedented misery, has been badged up as another “EU ambush”. Indeed EU leaders are already privately apologising for the “misfire” of the negative way in which she has been received, saying that they have just absolutely had enough of Brexit. On this, surely, they speak for both sides.

But let us allow ourselves the brief treachery of seeing events from the European point of view. On Monday, Theresa May told her MPs that she wouldn’t be letting them vote on her Brexit deal, because she knew they would vote it down, and that she would have to extract from the EU side further concessions over the much hated backstop.

In private, on Monday, her aides worked on said concessions, some vague legal add-ons that would seek to further limit the likelihood of the backstop ever being needed. On Tuesday she went to see other EU leaders, who tentatively suggested some kind of concession might be possible. Jean-Claude Juncker himself said as much in the European parliament. And then, on Wednesday, rather than wait and see what might be done about the backstop, her own MPs tried to force her out anyway.

And now, it seems, European presidents from the Netherlands, Belgium and elsewhere, the ones who are most exposed to the consequences of a no-deal Brexit have taken the view that there is simply no point in appeasing the Tory hard Brexiteers any further. Whatever is given, more will be sought. And can you blame them? The man who organised Wednesday’s attempted coup against Theresa May, the MP Steve Baker, has previously given speeches in which he has said he is “dedicated to destroying the EU”.

How far exactly should EU leaders, who are not as dedicated to their own destruction and subsequent impoverishment as Mr Baker is, be willing to go to please him?

At the end of it all, of course, nothing has changed. The deal still isn’t going to get through the House of Commons. The EU appears no longer willing to give in to any of the kind of concessions that might help on that front (though there are surely none available).

And Theresa May certainly isn’t going to stand down as prime minister.

One senior EU figure told The Times that the point of all this was to make Britain “feel the bleak midwinter”, to frighten Britain into looking into the reality of no deal.

Have they learned nothing of us? We’re not scared of no deal. We’ve been lying our way out of the reality of that for months already. The Tory MPs Michael Fabricant and David TC Davies, to take just two examples, genuinely think it’s what the people voted for. The former footballers Peter Shilton and Chris Waddle are both well up for it.

Jacob Rees-Mogg reckons a no-deal exit will be worth “£1.1 trillion to the UK economy”, a lie he freely told to various breakfast shows of his own free will not very long ago, then had to clarify at lunchtime, saying it was “impossible to know if it could be true”.

The bleak midwinter? Come on. This is a nation that runs into the freezing sea on Christmas morning, just for fun. We’ve done it before and we’ll do it again. What do you mean? Of course we’ll be able to get back out again.