Theresa May is history, but history will be kind to her

Never has it looked more clear that she has been the pilot of a plane with a broken engine and a cabin full of terrorists

To the best of my understanding, Theresa May remains prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but nobody can be quite sure.

At time of writing, party officials are still going through the list of every government minister who is understood to have resigned thus far, in a frantic attempt to work out whether the country still has a government.

A man called Shailesh Vara, claiming to be a Northern Ireland minister, got the resignation ball rolling at 7.32am. That one’s been confirmed real, after the picture in his Twitter profile was successfully cross-referenced with historic CCTV footage from the House of Commons canteen.

Then came “Dominic Raab”, but that was definitely a false alarm because he was claiming to be the actual Brexit secretary, and that would mean he would be resigning over a deal he himself had negotiated, so it was instantly ruled out.

Not long later, a resignation letter from the former kids TV presenter Esther McVey was circulating online, but that included claims that she was “immensely proud” of her work as work and pensions secretary, so that too was dismissed as a hoax. Wrongly as it turned out.

By the time the prime minister rose to address the House of Commons at 10.30am, her aides were frantically seeking replacements for Ben Dover, who had, “with a heavy heart”, announced he could no longer carry on in good conscience as the junior minister for under carriages in the Department for Transport. Further letters were thought to have been received from Rehman Chishti, Isabelle Ringing and Phil McCracken.

Arguably the lowest point was when Downing Street called a woman named Suella Braverman, offering her a junior role in the Department for Exiting the European Union as a replacement for the departing Hugh Janus, only to be told she already worked there and was, as it happened, resigning herself, and no, she didn’t have Mr Janus’s number.

As the chimpanzee’s tea party crashed on around her, Theresa May did her utmost to impress upon the occasion some of the gravitas stripped of it by her own excuse of a party. She is already history, that much is beyond doubt, but as she stood at the despatch box, at the start of the longest day of her political life, there emerged the first faint glimmer of a chance that history might, in fact, look kindly upon her.

If Stan Lee had lived just a short while longer, he might have seen a superhero: Behold The Unstoppable Mediocrity. She will go on to the end, whatever the cost may be. She will not be stopped. Not by her party. Not by her government. Not by Brexit. Not even, one suspects, by no Brexit. Not by anyone. If a nuclear bomb had landed eight inches to her left, it would have been a maximum of a quarter of an hour before she was straightening her bedraggled hair and telling the emerging cockroaches that she was “getting on with the job”.

One shouldn’t forget that she chose this lot in life for herself. But she didn’t choose to be the High Priestess of this infantilised age. She didn’t choose Brexit. She didn’t choose Trump.

When a Brexit secretary resigns over a deal he himself has negotiated, it is so preposterous as to make her stronger not weaker.

In the early afternoon, Jacob Rees-Mogg called the press to the St Stephens Entrance of the Palace of Westminster, to announce with great fanfare that he handed in his letter of no confidence in the prime minister. He told the assembled crowd, barely audible beneath the din of protesters bellowing Stop Brexit, that “Leaving the European Union is the most fantastic opportunity for the United Kingdom.” It would, he said, “lead to lower tariffs and cheaper food”. This is a proposition so absurd it is very hard to describe it as anything other than a lie, and it is anything but the first of its kind.

It is, arguably, her fault, that she is in hoc to the Democratic Unionist Party, the only major Northern Irish party to walk out on the Good Friday Agreement. The demands they have made on her over the last two years reveal beyond doubt the prevention of a return of a hard border with Ireland is very far down their list of priorities, and they expect her not to care about it either.

As she stood at the despatch box, looking exhausted but resilient, as she was savaged from her own benches with far more viciousness than those opposite, she seemed to grow in stature, not reduce.

She has piloted a jet with a blown up engine and a cabin full of terrorists. Tony Blair once said, of the fight against fundamentalist Islam, that it was a particularly deadly enemy as its combatants were simply not afraid to die. Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson and the rest – these are people that do not care in the slightest about smashing their country and their party to pieces.

She now enters the realm of the unknowable, except for the sad fact that ultimately her fate is sealed. Will her own MPs move to a vote of no confidence in her? No one really knows. Would she win it? No one seems to know that either. Will she get her deal through parliament? Almost certainly not. And what happens then? Again, very unclear. Could there be a second referendum? A general election? Already there are too many variables to bother wandering down that conjectural pathway.

At the end of a gruelling day, she faced questions from journalists, and made an unlikely reference to her own cricketing hero, Geoffrey Boycott. She had a huge run chase on her hands. She was losing wickets by the minute. Did the team perhaps need a new captain? “I’ve always said one of my cricket heroes was Geoffrey Boycott,” she said. “And what do you know about Geoffrey Boycott? He stuck to it and got the runs in the end.”

It is somewhat unlikely that, in what are surely the death throes of the UK’s second female prime minister, cricketing analogies should come up again. As Geoffrey Howe memorably said of Margaret Thatcher: “It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.”

Theresa May is scarcely facing an opposition. The beamers are all coming in from her own side. Her wicket is coming, and after that will come defeat for the whole side. But never has it seemed less likely that, ultimately the blame for that defeat will be placed on her.