Theresa May’s open letter to the nation promises a campaign with ‘heart and soul’ – I’d rather she use her head

If the prime minister lands a victory, she will have sold that soul to her survivalist instincts, and saddled the country with a deal almost nobody other than herself wants

For years it has been the snug bar bore’s whine that the internet has killed the art of letter writing, and it seems the old git was right.

Take the prime minister. Her grasp of the form has become so enfeebled that she has written one (and this might be unique) addressed to nobody.

That puts her an epistolary rung below estate agents. When Winkworths and Barnham Marcus write to me unbidden, as they frequently do, they know enough to begin “Dear Homeowner”.

Today’s missive from Theresa May lacks that warmly personal touch at the start. No “Dear British People”. No “Dear Fellow Loyal Subjects”. Not even “To Whom It May Concern”.

She pitches straight in to an appeal apparently aimed, despite the lack of evidence, at us all. This could be another first. So far as I’m aware, no PM until now ever wrote an open letter to the populus.

If the text isn’t quite as thrillingly novel (basically, it’s what she told the Commons 10 days ago and reiterated verbatim in the press conference), her intention is.

In yet another trailblazing first, the letter showcases a British prime minister appealing to the British electorate over the head of the British parliament.

In other countries, that would qualify as a call for revolution. Here, it’s just the latest last throw of the dice until the next one.

You could put in a fair shift analysing her letter for nuance and subtlety. But at risk of oversimplifying a keynote address more than three times longer than Abraham Lincoln’s at Gettysburg, it can adequately be precis’d as follows. Heeeeeeellllllllllllllppppppppppp!

The last time she requested Brexit assistance from the public, it rewarded her by removing her majority. Understandably, her tactics have changed. Eighteen months ago – and she was very clear about this – she adamantly believed that the only democratic way to resolve the Brexit divisions was to ask the punters to express their will at the ballot box.

Now those divisions are wider and deeper, she passionately believes – and she could not be clearer about this – that the only democratic solution is to deny us a vote.

In place of a general election or second referendum, her meisterplan is to create a wave of support to sweep away resistance to her miserable fudge when she presents it to the Commons next month.

At this moment, with 80-90 Tory backbenchers and almost every opposition MP determined to vote against it, she is heading for a defeat so humiliating that even she might interpret it as a P45.

So she’s abandoned the outmoded idea that a PM wins a Commons vote by persuading MPs of its merit. If a Labour government tried this trick, she would savage it as a crude appeal to mob rule.

But the mob is as unlikely to pay attention to her letter as MPs are to be intimidated if it did. This is a religious war, and the faithful will go to the deselection stake if their local parties threaten it.

Her next last throw of the dice has already been trailed. If there’s one better way of upholding the democratic precepts than preventing the people from voting, it’s weaponising the honours system.

So far, the only known example of this is the knighthood granted, weeks ahead of the New Year’s list, to the Brexity backbencher now known as Sir John Hayes. He insists he won’t be swayed by that, and it will be hilarious if he proves this by voting against the deal.

Yet the last thing traditionalists like me will be able to stomach is the defiling of a system that has always displayed the British state at its noblest.

Until now, it has been flawless in identifying and rewarding integrity (Lord Archer, Sir Philip Green, etc etc). The award of the CBE to Vidkun Quisling shortly before he sold Norway out to Hitler underlines the point.

If Brexit is to be a kind of Norway super plus on the honours front, with a torrent of Ks and a fire sale at the ermine robe shop, trust in the system would be endangered. And we couldn’t live with that.

Speaking of heart, the PM pledges to fight with that and more. “I will be campaigning with my heart and soul to win that vote,” she ends her letter, “and to deliver this Brexit deal.”

“C’est magnifique”, as someone said about the Charge of the Light Brigade, “mais ce n’est pas la guerre”. It might be even more magnifique, and less suicidally delusional, if she relied less on heart and soul, and used her brain.

If she lands the biggest upset in a two-horse race since 42-1 shot James “Buster” Douglas knocked out Mike Tyson in Tokyo, she will have sold that soul to her survivalist instincts, and saddled the country with a deal almost nobody other than herself wants. If not, her obstinacy will have taken us to the edge of the no deal nobody but the craziest of crazies wants.

For the 279th time of writing, the only intellectually coherent resolution is to try a form of democracy even more novel than a prime ministerial open letter addressed to no one. We the people, charmed though we are to be the presumed recipients of her missive, must be given a vote.