Parliament has voted against all Brexit options – which could help Theresa May get her deal through

Not a single option came anywhere near the 320 votes needed for an overall majority. The most popular was Margaret Beckett's proposal for a referendum on any Brexit deal, which won 268 votes, 52 votes short

The House of Commons has voted against all eight Brexit options in its X Factor contest. It is a boost to the prime minister’s hopes of getting her deal through – on the same day that Boris Johnson and several other Tory rebels backed it, but the DUP said “no”.

Unless she can persuade the DUP to vote for her deal, her chances of taking the UK out of the EU and thus ending her premiership, as she confirmed today, seem remote. But if the DUP is really playing tough before switching at the last moment, then she now has a slightly better chance of securing a majority in parliament for her deal than she had before.

Tonight’s indicative votes were an exercise in slaughtering unicorns. One by one, the cherished hopes of different groups of MPs – some of them more reality-based than others – were extinguished by the brutal arithmetic of votes.

Not a single option came anywhere near the 320 votes needed for an overall majority. The most popular was Margaret Beckett’s proposal for a referendum on any Brexit deal, which won 268 votes, 52 votes short.

The second most popular option was Ken Clarke’s plan for a permanent customs union – Labour’s main policy of small difference with the government. It secured 264 votes. Even with 29 ministers who attend cabinet abstaining, no options secured more votes in favour than against. The fashionable Norway-plus option did particularly badly, attracting only 188 votes.

So all the brave talk about how there is a majority in the Commons for a softer Brexit than the prime minister’s plan has turned out to be hollow. Theresa May must be wishing she had taken her predecessor David Cameron’s advice and held these indicative votes herself some time ago, instead of forcing backbench MPs to take control of parliament to do so this late in the day.

This was, as its advocates always claimed it would be, a clarifying moment. Except that it has clarified that the choice facing parliament was, as it has been since November, a choice between the prime minister’s deal, leaving without a deal, or not leaving.

What has changed now is that a no-deal Brexit has been ruled out, and so the reason why a third meaningful vote is substantially different from the second one – to answer the objection to it of John Bercow, the speaker – is that the Commons now faces a straight choice between leaving on the terms negotiated by the government and postponing Brexit for a long time and possibly for ever.

Now MPs have to accept that all the escape routes from that choice are closed off. They will return to this indulgence on Monday – as long as the prime minister’s deal has not been put to a vote on Friday – in an attempt to rework the more popular options to try to secure a majority.

But the numbers are not there. No system of preferential voting can get any option up to the magic 320, except the one option that wasn’t part of the indicative votes exercise – the government’s deal.

Either on Friday or on another day before 12 April, the Commons will have to choose between that deal and the long delay that Donald Tusk, the EU Council president, confirmed today he would like to offer us.