Theresa May said she likes walking, cooking and watching DVD box sets, and still managed to sound like an alien shapeshifter

Selling an already dead vision of Brexit to the general public would be beyond even the Wolf of Wall Street, yet the Terrified Rabbit of Downing Street is giving it a go

The last time Theresa May went round the country talking to actual human beings, the country rendered itself ungovernable. And the early signs of her UK-wide “Brexit tour” strongly intimate we should expect more of the same.

Traditionally while standing on stage taking questions from the general public, the prime minister carries the kind of easy air you might expect to see on the face of someone doing their supermarket shopping fully naked in the middle of an anxiety dream, an activity which, around two minutes in, most of her audience at a Q&A session at an engineering firm in Newcastle looked like they would much rather be doing.

Theresa May’s “Chequers agreement”, the name mysteriously given to the Brexit proposals that her cabinet fundamentally failed to agree on at Chequers two weeks ago, has now been all but dismissed out of hand in Brussels, too.

Which means that, the day before the Westminster summer holidays, Theresa May has launched a nationwide tour in which she will seek to sell it to the public despite it being very obviously dead. It is a sales task far beyond the capacity even of the Wolf of Wall Street, and yet the Terrified Rabbit of Downing Street really is going to give it a go.

Arguably credit should be given to the staff member at Reece Group, who evidently knew the question that guarantees total malfunction in the country’s robot Prime Minister. It has been several months since ITV’s Julie Etchingham sent Theresa May into what bore every outward resemblance to a hyper-extended panic attack by asking her, on International Women’s Day, what she does to unwind.

When the same question came again, it was clear some new firmware has been uploaded to the Maybot, but it’s very much still in beta phase.

“I like walking,” she said, her face suddenly transformed into an Egyptian death mask of pure terror. “My husband and I like to go for walks. And cooking! I like cooking!”

It turns out there is “a benefit” to cooking, because you “get to eat it as well as err, err, err, errr, err making it.”

And it also turns out the prime minister has “over 150 cookbooks” and “spends a lot of her time looking at cookbooks,” which only really makes ever more startling the fact that before the general election last year, she served her strategy team chicken lasagne and boiled potatoes.

And we also learned that she enjoys the “American TV series NCIS.”

The objective facts here are so down to earth as to be almost a masterclass. What does normal Theresa May do to relax? She walks, she cooks and she watches low-rent TV box sets. To take this answer, pick it up and cloak it in such manifest peculiarity as to make impossible to rule out the chance that she may be an alien shapeshifter is frankly a wondrous achievement.

Still, what are the alternatives? The stakes are so very high at the moment, the country so bitterly divided that perhaps we should count ourselves lucky to have a prime minister utterly incapable of telling it anything other than how it is, even if her life depended on it.

Arguably we should all be very grateful for a prime minister who you think would not even be able to con a four-year-old into believing in Father Christmas.

At least when reality bites we can’t say we weren’t warned. It’s been glaringly obvious for years.