Ploughing on with her disastrous backstop plan, Theresa May resembles hapless Grayling

The terror that she really is prepared to jeopardise peace in Northern Ireland along with the national economy intensifies by the day

It may never join “omnishambles” as an OED new word of the year, but I propose this addition to the lexicon all the same.

Grayle (v): to speak palpable and provable gibberish so unfailingly that your every declaration is interpreted as a guarantee of its diametric opposite.

If that’s confusing, a contextual example might help. “Chris was banging on the other night about why Burnley will win the Premier League.”

“But that’s a mathematical impossibility.” “Yeah, but he reckons its a sure thing.” “Didn’t he say the same when he backed that one-legged yakherd from Tajikistan to beat Djokovic at Wimbledon? And when he remortgaged his flat to lump on the British entry in Eurovision.” “Yup.”

“So Chris was talking arrant cobblers again.” “No, he went beyond that. He was grayling.”

And so to the man behind the verb. Chris Grayling has stated – and he could not have been clearer about this – that Brexit will happen on schedule on 29 March.

“I’ve been in every cabinet meeting, and there’s been no conversation about delaying,” insisted the transport secretary, in a rebuke to Jeremy Hunt’s recent hint that it will be postponed. “We are not delaying Article 50. Brexit will still happen on 29 March.”

Hearing the genius responsible for the railways dismiss any chance that a departure time will be missed, I wept for him and his lack of ironic self-awareness. Then again, my commute is a gruelling 100ft stroll to a garden shed. If you’re reading this on the platform where you’ve written a trilogy of wistful rite-of-passage novels while awaiting the 7.23 from Haywards Heath, you may not share the pity.

Even before he left the studio to grayle about other matters, such as commandeering the Lusitania, Jack Sparrow’s Black Pearl and seven pedalos from the Regent’s Park pond for his armada of imaginary ferries, a development emerged in Belfast.

The implications of David Trimble’s legal challenge to the Irish border backstop are as unclear for now as all else, but his timing showed a surprising sense of mischief.

Trimble must have been brooding on this for several months, yet waited until hours before Theresa May’s Euro-Masochism Tour reached Northern Ireland to drop the bombshell.

At the time of writing, the PM has yet to give the speech in which, according to the pre-released text, she was expected to say this. “We will find a way to deliver Brexit that honours our commitments to Northern Ireland, blah blah di blahhhh, honours our commitments to Northern Ireland, yada yada, commands broad support across the community, winner, winner, chicken dinner, secures a majority in the Westminster parliament, dum di dum di dum, which is the best way to deliver for the people of Northern Ireland.”

For most national leaders, a legal attempt to remove the backstop from a withdrawal agreement hovering between life and death would dictate an emergency rewrite. If Trimble succeeds, after all, there will be no vestige of any deal, even a lousy one, on the table. Most leaders would feel obliged to acknowledge this, and amend the speech accordingly.

But May is special. Oliver Sacks’ catatonics in Awakenings had a quicker response time to shifting events. In the sea lane of geopolitical life, she’s a supertanker with a broken rudder.

So one presumes she will ignore Trimble entirely, and plough ahead with the same vacuous reassurances from the same drivelling text.

If so, she will plap this: “The measure of this moment in Northern Ireland’s history must be more than whether we avoid a return to the challenges of the past. It must be how, together, we move forwards to shape the opportunities of the future.”

Dazzlingly profound stuff, as you’d expect from the George W Bush “Mission Accomplished” Fantasy Writers’ Room. But does the possibility of a return to those past challenges, or “Troubles” as we used to euphemise the murderous violence, deserve such nonchalant disregard?

Lord Trimble seems to think not, though you wouldn’t give much credence to him. As a key architect of the Good Friday Agreement, and the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for that, it’s hardly as if he’s an expert. Not that he’d be worth indulging if he was.

But even if he is just a busybody looking to fill empty days, he might for all we know win his case. Gina Miller, another vexatious litigant bent on frustrating the will of the people, won hers.

And then what? Even if the wheels of justice grind exceedingly quickly, there will be barely a month after any judgment before the Brexit Day bunting goes up.

You hope the PM enjoys herself this week. A pots-and-kettles echo chamber symposium with Arlene Foster about the evil EU’s intransigence sounds fun. Then it’s off to Brussels to tease Jean-Claude Juncker into giving his impression of the face in Munch’s The Scream (the Norway option).

But after all the merriment, when she’s coming down from the adrenaline high over one of Arthur Askey’s scotch-and-baked-beans suppers, she might reflect on whether her own impersonation of a suicide bomber wobbling on a tightrope with a slab of sweating Semtex and a country strapped to her chest risks losing its appeal.

The terror that she really is prepared to jeopardise peace in Northern Ireland along with the national economy intensifies by the day. Unthinkable as this must seem, it could turn out that Grayling for once wasn’t grayling at all.