John Bercow told Theresa May she'd need to find a 'substantially different' Brexit deal. Good luck with that

The speaker's latest self-insertion in the Brexit process was his most pompous yet, but it was also the most important

The spell of Groundhog Day is ultimately broken when Bill Murray learns to stop being an insufferable person, so quite how John Bercow did it remains something of a mystery.

But nevertheless, he did. On Monday afternoon, with a short 15 minute speech when a solitary sentence would have done, Bercow liberated the nation from its Sisyphean meaningful vote myth. And in so doing, he made Theresa May’s already impossible job that much harder.

In the last week there has been no shortage of confusion over whether May’s apparent strategy of compelling MPs to vote again and again on her withdrawal deal until they at last get it right is an abuse of parliamentary procedure.

And, with all his customary pomposity, Bercow granted himself permission to make a statement to the house addressing the matter directly.

The house sat in stony silence as he took them on a potted history of the last four months of the Brexit process. The vote delayed in December, defeated in January by a historic margin of 230 votes, delayed again, twice, then repeated last week, and defeated again, this time by a mere 149.

For much of the day up to this point, discussion in Westminster had been about whether May might have talked the DUP and enough of her own backbenchers into switching sides and voting for her deal to make the idea of scheduling a third “meaningful vote” this week a possibility.

But, almost at the precise moment rumours were emerging that she had failed to do so, and therefore would not be calling a vote, she was told (not in so many words) that she couldn’t call one anyway.

Referring, painfully slowly and just as surely, to decisions made by previous speakers in the nineteenth century, Bercow eventually delivered his coup de grace. That if May wished to bring a motion on her withdrawal deal for a third time, it would need to be “substantially different” to the motion that was defeated last week.

Perhaps conveniently for her, she had, by this point, already decided she could not do the thing she was now being told she could not do.

But quite where Mr Bercow’s intervention leaves Brexit is anything but clear. The UK can’t leave the EU with a deal unless the House of Commons approves it. It has already rejected it. The EU has been clear it will not be renegotiating the aspects of the deal that are causing it to be defeated in Westminster, chiefly the Irish backstop.

In other words, there are no substantially different options on offer. And only substantially different options can now be voted upon.

As Bercow pontificated, it was hard not to cast one’s mind back to October of last year. That was when the speaker faced bullying allegations from members of his staff of the utmost severity, and loud calls for his resignation.

Back then, as well regarded a statesperson as Dame Margaret Beckett was at least honest when she admitted her and a number of her backbench Labour colleagues were prepared to overlook it all because Brexit “trumps bad behaviour”.

Beckett and her colleagues had their eyes on the fights that would be coming down the line, and in Bercow they had an ally.

Even so, it is also hard to see who has won with this intervention. The more hardline wing of the European Research Group are not relishing having to go through the motions of voting down the motion yet again, as they would certainly have done so. But the “substantially different” proposition that might now be put before them is more likely, in Brexit terms, to be substantially softer than substantially harder.

What it almost certainly means, for the time being, is that May will, at this weeks’ European Council Summit, have to apply for a nine-month extension to the Article 50 process, and she is likely to get it.

Nine months is a very, very, very long time in politics these days. What is at least certain is that things will be substantially different by then, though quite how, no one can possibly know.