Neither Brussels nor Westminster is stupid enough to play Boris Johnson’s futile game

At this most recent moment of high farce, it was an ingenious touch to have a speaker that can’t speak. John Bercow has completely lost his voice

The Speaker of the House of Commons croaked out the words “statement from the prime minister” and up the prime minister got.

The rolling spectacle of Britain’s slow motion self-immolation has been the world’s most popular surrealist comedy drama for quite a few years now, and all credit really must go to the scriptwriters for finding new motifs through which to elevate the same fundamental plot structure, season after season after season.

At this, the most recent moment of high farce, it was an ingenious touch to have a speaker that can’t speak. John Bercow has completely lost his voice.

Here was Boris Johnson, presenting his supposed breakthrough-enabling, deadlock-breaking brand new Brexit proposals. Obviously they’re not meant to herald an actual breakthrough, that would ruin the whole premise of the show, which is like a sort of pin-striped Gilligan’s Island but with much more psychological cruelty.

But even so, to insert, at this point, a speaker that can’t actually speak is the most nihilistic moment in the franchise to date.

Was John Bercow waking into an anxiety dream a metaphor for the whole tortuous misery of Brexit process? Did he just have a cold? Who can really know?

Either way, Bercow’s ever more passionate affair with the sound of his own voice is Brexit’s only uplifting plotline so there was real heartbreak here for regular viewers.

No love story can have taken such a brutally unexpected turn since Toadfish accidentally drove Dee off a cliff on the way back from their wedding in Neighbours. That said, she returned 13 years later as her own evil twin and managed to con him out of his life savings so there’s still hope for a comeback.

In two long, pointless hours of questions not a single “orrdeeeeaaaarr” was attempted. John Bercow is not the most self-aware man, but even he seemed to realise the futility of attempting to command the authority of a room of people of whom most entirely loathe him while sounding all the while like Darth Vader’s drunken granddad.

At one point, he tried to expel the full six syllables of the now infamous words “Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown” (yes the “International Lounge One” is back and raring to go after his premature expulsion on “law and order” day at Tory Party conference).

The mere saying of his name seemed to last for around twenty minutes. The bass tremors rattled the glass in the windows. In a building that is should have been condemned around a hundred years ago, it felt decidedly unsafe.

Johnson, for his part, struck a more conciliatory tone. It appeared to be a genuine appeal to MPs from all over the commons, which is sweet when you think that if he’d had his way, the whole place would still be shut down.

It was a farce, of course, all of it. What is currently happening is that Boris Johnson has come up with some new Brexit proposals that could, in theory, pass through parliament, so that when the European Union inevitably rejects them, they can duly be blamed.

The proposals, essentially, replace the one hard border in Ireland with two, ten miles apart. There’ll be no “infrastructure at the border”, it will instead be five miles away in both directions.

The DUP are fine with it, so is Steve Baker and the fully deranged wing of the Conservative Party. But while Johnson was speaking, both Ireland and the EU dismissed it as “unworkable” and “unrealistic”. Senior figures in the EU Parliament have said it has no chance of approval in its current form.

Sitting two rows behind Johnson was Theresa May. Over two hours, her right eyebrow rose and fell on at least four separate occasions, a veritable concerto of human emotion.

Anna Soubry pointed out the stunningly obvious in the most succinct way. All he had done was “a deal with the DUP and the ERG”. Theresa May’s deal might not have had those people on board, but it did have the slight advantage of actually having the EU onside.

It is not hard to find a form of Brexit that the House of Commons will approve, if you stop caring whether the EU will approve it. Not hard at all. There are dozens of options.

You know the narrative arc by now. After faux breakthrough comes disappointment, then extension, and the whole futile game returns for a new season. Sometimes, with a new protagonist. We can only hope.