Theresa May's leadership is more secure than it was yesterday – but the nation has suffered for it

The national reserve of political fudge must be reaching the point of exhaustion

Time is running out and the Brexit votes over the next two days could shape our lives for decades to come (Screengrab)

Not for the first time, a good day for Theresa May is a bad day for the nation. With only one ministerial resignation and a bravado performance by the Conservative whips’ office, her leadership is more secure than seemed possible a few days ago. Boris will have to wait again. Theresa lives to fight another day, if not another general election.

Apart from stuffing the foreign secretary back in his box, perhaps the best thing that can be said for the government’s string of victories in the parliamentary votes on Brexit is that they “kick the can down the road”, as has so often been the case during this dismal Brexit process. In some respects, then, there is a chance for parliament, on behalf of a divided and misled people, to assert its right to have certain questions left open. To a degree, some of these, such as on customs and the final parliamentary approval of the deal – with the option to stay in the EU – have been left open.

Thus, further amendments and discussions will lead to new government-sponsored amendments to the legislation being tabled when the bill returns to the Lords. At that point, again, some reason may return to the process, and a hard Brexit may be averted.

Yet that is only a chance, and there is a sense that the government has regained the initiative and restored much of the momentum behind its messy and ill-defined plan, such as it is, for Brexit.

The hard, logical, binary decisions, then, have been postponed, yet again. The national reserve of political fudge must be reaching the point of exhaustion, such is the splicing and slicing of terms such as “a” customs union or “a” customs arrangement. It is surely an attempt to postpone the inevitable – a hard border in Northern Ireland and unacceptable customs delays at the Channel ports will fail. We cannot know when this calamity will befall the nation but, in the absence of workable practical high-tech solutions, that day will certainly arrive.

There is still a hope – though diminishing because of a series of minimal, and possibly misleading, concessions by the government whips towards the Tory rebels – that parliament will in due course have the right to a properly “meaningful vote” on Brexit – which is to say that the House of Commons should exercise the right to assert that remaining in the European Union is preferable to whatever deal the government manages to wring out of Michel Barnier, let alone the so-called “no deal” hard Brexit disaster.

So much remains to play for. As the negotiations grind on, the prospect of an advantageous deal for the UK, one where circles can be squared and cakes be had and eaten, will evaporate with every week. The Conservative cabinet and the wider party in parliament and the country, for that matter, will remain divided on the most fundamental of choices. Such unity as Ms May has managed to achieve has, as ever, been secured only through artful language, the dark arts of the whips’ office and because the competing egos sitting with her around the cabinet table cannot agree on a replacement for her. And so she staggers on.

Thus far, the tight parliamentary arithmetic of the votes on Europe has been dictated by the shifting balance of dissent in both main parties. Labour’s anti-Brexit rebels are weighed in the balance with Conservative anti-Brexit or pro-hard Brexit rebels. Hence the diceyness of so many of these votes.

What would transform things would be if the Labour leadership could find it in itself to act in the national interest and support the final right of parliament to determine the national destiny. Yet Jeremy Corbyn, consistently giving the impression of being a closet Leaver, refuses to do the one thing that would virtually guarantee the demise of the May government, preserve the jobs that depend on trade with Europe, and give the British left its best chance in half a century to secure a socialist government.

By the end of the year, Mr Corbyn could be setting about fixing the railways, abolishing student fees, saving the NHS, creating the national education service and launching the great anti-poverty and national investment programme he so often dreams of. He would be faced with a Tory party in utter disarray.

It is a matter of historic failure – for his party as well as the country – that he shows so little sign of being ready or willing to see the bigger picture, do the right thing and, for better or worse, set about building a socialist Britain. Mr Corbyn has been in the Commons for long enough to know all too well that Tory rebels do not vote for Labour frontbench amendments, and yet he has continued to offer them, and therefore the government, that handy escape route on every possible occasion.

Until Labour shifts its attitude, the chances are that the government will continue to push its legislation through, albeit with a few dents and dings along the way. And Jeremy Hunt, Chris Grayling and Philip Hammond will continue their current policies of privatisation and austerity: in such a situation, Mr Corbyn has no moral right to complain about the state of the nation.

Faced with the biggest of political changes, Europe, and after a period of surprising ascendancy, Mr Corbyn is deflating before our very eyes. Peak Corbyn, such as it was, has passed.