Roll up, roll up, and see the Naked Emperor of Downing Street, resplendent in strips of flannel and fluff. I’ll make a plea – don’t be distracted by his antics, nothing of substance has changed.

He’s also trying to make the facts fit his spin. They won’t. Prime Minister Johnson says a no-deal on October 31 means the UK will keep a “very substantial” part of the £39 billion owed to the EU. Let’s unpack that – the financial settlement is not a bill, it is an existing debt which the UK is obliged to pay. We also want it to be paid, because it is that money that is paying our farmers, our universities, our students on Erasmus and all the other programmes we benefit from up and down Scotland. The idea that the first act of “Global Britain” is to wilfully default on its sovereign debt but then somehow seek to trade with the world and be taken seriously is just risible.

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But our PM can do the ridiculous as well as the sublime. He claimed Melton Mowbray pork pies are exported to Thailand and Iceland, but barred from the US. The head of the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie Association said that perhaps the Prime Minister meant Iceland the store since the pies aren’t exported to either of the countries suggested, and that exporting them to the US isn’t a viable option either. Is the PM making it up as he goes along? Yes, not because he doesn’t know, but because he is trying to distract you.

I’m afraid from Brussels we have reached the stage of “At least Theresa May ...”. Not quite nostalgia, but a realisation that things are steadily getting worse. My personal line is “at least Theresa May took this seriously”. But because of her disastrous, self-inflicted red lines her Withdrawal Agreement only tells us about the exit, but nothing, zero, about the future. It kicks the can further down the road, saying the future relationship can be sorted out in a two-year transition period. Surely recent history warns against that assumption.

You’ll hear a lot in coming weeks that “we just need to get Brexit past us”. Trust me, an exit either under something like Mrs May’s agreement or without a deal altogether “guarantees” that politics in these islands will be dominated by Brexit, except that we’ll also be midway through a prolonged economic and social crisis.

The content of May’s deal is the same. EU attitudes towards the package are the same. The only real change is that the UK’s standing has dropped further. Johnson is “wired to the moon”, according to one of my Berlin contacts, and Downing Street has turned from a seat of government to a campaigning organisation.

The UK Government, right now, is focused on getting Brexit over the line at any cost, because Boris Johnson has invested so much of his personal political capital in doing so. It doesn’t matter that two of the four constituent parts of this United Kingdom voted to Remain in the EU, doesn’t matter that the vote three years ago was narrow and plagued with concerns around the information available, doesn’t matter that the current Prime Minister himself was hauled up by the UK statistics authority for a “clear misuse of official statistics”. There is a core gang in Downing Street who will put the no-deal gun to the collective head of the UK and tell the EU “we’ll do it”. They know the effects of no deal, and they’re banking on the rest of the MPs thinking that a bad deal is better than a catastrophic deal.

Labour is the worry here. If you want to stop no-deal but aren’t that bothered about stopping Brexit, then there’s Mrs May’s text already done and signed off by the UK Government and, provisionally, the EU. I can well imagine it will be a tempting prospect for MPs who just want to make it stop and have deluded themselves that this deal will do it.

It won’t, it will usher in another two years of uncertainty and worry, except we’ll be out. Be in no doubt, once we leave, if we do, then the way back will be harder for the UK. The opt-outs and the rebate will be off the table, and there won’t be any sort of goodwill to find a compromise.

The view from Brussels is somewhere between weary resignation, and whatever the opposite of schadenfreude is. The EU isn’t pushing the UK out, and has made it clear that the UK can revoke Article 50 unilaterally up until the eleventh hour. This is very far from over.

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Scotland’s future in Europe will be won or lost on the floor of the House of Commons, and that’s not an easy thing for me to say. The problem is not Scotland, the problem is not Brussels or Dublin, the problem is Westminster and what it is inflicting upon us. We are in dangerous times, with a UK administration hell-bent on reducing international goodwill, gifting power to their unaccountable pals and endangering all our interests, while cocking a snook at established democratic procedures.

We need to circle the wagons. Cross-party working, not stunts, and MPs are already ramping up their efforts to band together and keep the UK off the rocks. But the clock is ticking, and I dread to think what will happen next.

• Alyn Smith is an SNP MEP for Scotland