For God’s sake, Mrs May, when will you make an end?

There are some stories that simply do not resonate with the public. It doesn’t matter how true they are, they are seen as irrelevant to whatever passes for real life. Did the Russians use social media to help sway the U.S. election? Probably. Might something similar have gone on during the referendum campaign? Possibly. Who knows?

But in the UK, it seems to me, no one is blaming the Russians for our current Brexit predicament. We don’t even blame poor David Davis, to whom we wish a happy retirement. We blame ourselves (that is to say, we blame those who voted the opposite way to us). But with the talks stretching out into a distant, unknowable future, we are like the Pope in The Agony and the Ecstasy calling out to Michelangelo as he labours each day in the Sistine Chapel, “When will you make an end?”

“When it’s finished,” comes the asthmatic response from the Italian master.

The difference is that the Pope was Julius II and Michelangelo was Michelangelo.

There is a general recognition today that the British Government has played a poor hand badly throughout the Brexit crisis. But there is also growing resentment of Brussels for making getting past the finishing post such a nightmare. On the Remain side, we like to poke fun at the Tories, who seem to have lost the will to govern. Many of us are calling for a second referendum, believing that we would end up with a different result. But a re-run will only happen if there is a significant change in the overall public mood. In other words, Theresa May and her get-out team have to completely blow it – something which, it must be said, is not entirely to be ruled out.

Even then, for a radical shift to happen, the Labour Party would have to reverse its present course, and there is simply no sign of that. Corbyn wants Brexit. He doesn’t hate the EU, he merely disregards it. He’s not looking for a seat on the European Council, what he’s after is total control in Westminster and Whitehall. He wants Socialism in one country. His MPs, meanwhile, including the Remain majority, are falling into line behind him precisely because they are desperate to see a Labour prime minister in Downing Street, Brexit or no Brexit. Many of them, following the logic of eggs and omelettes, see a catastrophic deal, combined with the Government’s inability to pursue a meaningful domestic agenda, as the very thing that will propel them back into power.

Stalin, when warned of the Vatican’s opposition to his policies, famously asked, “How many divisions has the Pope?” (Pius XI was no Pope Julius.) The same could be asked of parliamentary Remainers. When the chips are down, how many votes do the Remain side have? How many ordinary Britons, fed up to the back teeth with the Brexit debate, are ready to take to the streets in quest of a second vote, leading to more confusion and another round of asymetric talks, this time on membership of the Euro and the Schengen accords? There are, of course, those who are willing to go to the wall for Europe, believing that the vote to leave represents nothing less than Destiny denied. But at this late stage, with the Tories reduced to a rabble, most voters, in my view, simply want the issue resolved one way or the other so that normal politics can resume. Better, they reckon, a lumpy Brexit than another five years of this humiliation and torture.

I was a Remainer, and I remain a Remainer. I will be a Remainer even after we have left. But there is a difference between Remain and Rorke’s Drift. The enemy is not seeking to kill us and there are no Victoria Crosses to be handed out.

If the Tories negotiating strategy falls apart completely over the next few months, so that the British position becomes a bit like that of France in the summer of 1940, then all bets are off. MPs would surely register their disgust in a Commons vote, leading to an immediate general election. The outcome of such an election would, in all likelihood, not be a stronger, hardline Tory administration – who in the centre ground could possibly want that? – but … Jeremy Corbyn and his neo-Marxist number two, John McDonnell, backed by 300 or more Labour MPs and, quite possibly, a rejuvenated SNP. The sop to Remain would be that we would stay in the Customs Union, if not the Single Market. Beyond that, anything could happen, not all of it bad, but much of it dangerous. You pays your money and you takes your chance.

Soooo … what to do? Speaking as a Remainer, I would like to see the pro-Europe Tory rump (more than a hundred of them) stand together with the preponderantly pro-Europe Labour Party, the Lib Dems and the SNP to reject a crap Brexit and request re-entry to the EU. It would be yet another humiliation for Britain, but we would get over it. After a while, maybe ten years from now, the horrors of the May regime would come to seem like no more than a bad dream.

But we are talking parliamentary revolution here, and that ain’t going to happen – not unless the present shower make a complete horlicks of Phase II, which, as I say I do not completely exclude. We are getting close to Laurel and Hardy country here. Another fine mess may not be far off. But I wouldn’t put money on it. And in extremis, party loyalties are extremely strong.

Which leaves (as Iain Martin argues elsewhere on Reaction this morning), only two other options: either we press for a “reasonable” mainstream Brexit that keeps us more or less aligned with Europe on trade, including financial services, or we go for a hard (let us call it a “firm”) Brexit that allows us to head off in a direction of our own choosing. The latter course is exciting, though fraught with extreme risk. Then again, the same was true of the referendum. But it has to be one or the other. Those who hope that Corbyn will, instead, present them with a dramatic last-minute deliverance are barking up the wrong tree.