HAVING gone through Kubler-Ross stages of Brexit – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance – I found myself just a little put out by the latest extension of the Article 50 deadline conceded by Brussels on Thursday.

I don’t want to go back to anger and denial. We’ve had enough of that from Theresa May. The can has been kicked down the road so often that you just want to jump on it and flatten the damned thing.

This week we go back to the bargaining stage, but we may not even get that. Parliament has been given an extra fortnight for May to prevaricate, and for the Commons to avoid coming to a consensus.

At least the prospect of no deal on Friday might have concentrated minds, like an execution, and forced MPs to seize the reins of power from this battered and friendless Prime Minister.

Instead, we have another fortnight to learn what we already know: that MV3 seems as remote as ever, and Theresa May won’t give up on it.

The European Union’s political leaders were, of course, acting in their own best interests on Thursday. Having listened to May ramble on incoherently for 90 minutes, the 27 concluded that, yes, she really is daft enough to let a no-deal Brexit happen.

Well, they can live with that if they have to. But what they weren’t prepared to do is allow her to blame the European Union for the breakdown so, to coin a phrase, they took back control.

The heads of government offered to delay the Brexit deadline until May 23, if she gets her deal through Parliament, or April 12 if she doesn’t. They will go the extra mile, explore all options, and then even offer a longer extension if all else fails. It’s jaw-jaw not war-war, and they are the virtuosos of jaw-jaw.

Though in truth, Brussels doesn’t really know what happens when the talking finally ends.

The problem with the European Union is that they expect political leaders to behave as rational agents, who seek the most advantageous outcome. They don’t have protocols to deal with mad-as-a-hatter prime ministers and a parliament that has lost the plot.

The UK has decided to have a collective mental breakdown, in full technicolour, and will not be talked out of it by boring bureaucrats with their seemingly sensible solutions.

After 1,000 days, the simple fact is that UK still doesn’t know what Brexit means. That image of the cat manically scratching at the door, and then refusing to leave when it’s opened, is only too apt.

Everyone knows that the obvious destination for a country like Britain, which has vital trading links with Europe but doesn’t want to be part of the political union, is to join the European Economic Area, now dubbed “Common Market 2.0”.

That alone allows friction-free trade, avoids an Irish border and halts these daft, wartime preparations for no deal. (I mean, staffing a nuclear bunker in Whitehall to co-ordinate the military functions of Operation Yellowhammer. It’s pure Dad’s Army).

There has always been a majority in Parliament for soft Brexit, everyone says so. But as I pointed out last week, our system seems incapable of distilling compromise from the mash of party interests.

MPs say they want to reach across party boundaries, but as last week’s walkouts and tetchy letters confirmed, they don’t really. No-one wants to take any responsibility, no one wants to blink first, no-one wants to make the first step.

Yet to halt Theresa May’s Thelma and Louise-style drive to the cliff edge, ministers and MPs will have to remove her from office, probably through a confidence motion, and set up a kind of provisional government.

They need to force the long delay she refuses to contemplate. This week’s indicative votes on their own won’t cut it. The nightmare, indeed, is that nothing gets a majority.

The Westminster system requires a semi-dictatorial Prime Minister, with an unassailable majority, to function. But May is a dictator without an army. She has no majority, yet perversely behaves as if she still has one.

What residue of authority she possessed evaporated after her petulant outburst against MPs on Wednesday. Even Labour MPs who were tempted to vote for her deal, like Lisa Nandy, were so outraged that they resolved to vote against her come what may.

What can you do with a Prime Minister who wilfully alienates her potential allies?

Theresa May actually had a point about Parliament only being able to agree on what it doesn’t want. We all thought that the problem was the Withdrawal Agreement, the 587-page legal document signed off by May last year, which contained the infamous Irish backstop. But we now know that this is not the case.

Last week, Labour declared that they did not have any problems with the Withdrawal Agreement or the backstop, despite Jeremy Corbyn having condemned it in November. He said then that May’s Withdrawal Agreement was “a half-baked deal which Britain cannot leave”, and the backstop would deny Britain “the sovereign right of any UK parliament to unilaterally withdraw from any backstop”.

All Labour now wants is a tweak to the Political Declaration – that non-binding, non-legal compendium of cliches, aspiration and wishful thinking that accompanied the Withdrawal Agreement. I seem to remember writing that to say this was woolly would be an insult to sheep. So why has it become a deal-breaker?

The blame obviously lies principally with the Prime Minister – a woman so bereft of vision and leadership ability that she shouldn’t be left in charge of a milk float, let alone a country.

She could have offered Labour anything they wanted: full consultation, customs union, workers' rights, environmental standards, regulatory alignment. It would have meant little because the Political Declaration is non-binding. Instead, she has made a fetish of inflexibility which is the worst failing in a political leader. She is in love with her idea of herself as a “bloody difficult woman”, and thinks that backing down, resiling, is a betrayal of her sex.

That is why I ended up voting for the petition to Revoke Article 50. To my horror, I found myself agreeing with Nigel Farage and Michael Portillo that the only real choice, if Parliament cannot act, is between no deal and no Brexit.

The only certain way to end this horror show is to pull the plug, halt the madness and pretend the last three years never happened. Even if Parliament does end up backing May’s deal, which of course is still possible, it won’t put an end to this nightmare.

The Withdrawal Agreement is only the start. It deals with citizenship, the divorce bill and the Irish backstop. Negotiations over Britain’s future trading relations with the EU have yet to begin, and will take two to four years. Four more years of this would be beyond endurance.

And it won’t be Theresa May who is doing the negotiating, but perhaps Boris Johnson, or some other Tory leader. If voters were fully aware of this fact, I’m sure that the parliamentary petition calling for Article 50 to be revoked would top 17 million within the week.