NO doubt as a result of my last column, in which I predicted that she would go down in history as the worst prime minister of all time, worse even than Lord North who lost British control of North America, Theresa May has resigned; or rather, it being Mrs May, she hasn’t done anything quite so straightforwar.

Just as she had previously reassured backbench Tory MPs that she wouldn’t be leader by the time of the next General Election (which, if you ask me, and if they had had any backbone or sense at all, would be happening about now), she’s promising that she’ll quit if her catastrophically bad Withdrawal Agreement (WA) is passed. This is like a persistent insurance salesman offering to sell you cover after he’s soaked your soft furnishings in petrol and then offering to leave quietly if you’ll just let him fling a lit box of Swan Vestas onto the sofa – and later discovering that the policy specifically excludes arson.

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Whether the Prime Minister can come up with a variation, or a decoupling, or some other twist that will persuade the Speaker to allow her to table Meaningful Vote 3: Westminster Drift, today is largely irrelevant. Unless the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) can be won round, there seems no chance it will pass, even with the very attractive sweetener of seeing the back of her. And why should it? Wednesday’s votes on eight different options (all of them, in my view, better than the WA), showed that five of the eight were more popular than the deal Mrs May is still flogging, like some specialist purveyor of hippic euthanasia.

Since none of those hypothetical options secured a majority, we needn’t worry about their qualities, nor about the small detail of whether they would be acceptable to the EU. All the same, it says something about the obtuseness of MPs that the order of their preferences was more or less the opposite of the relative merits of each plan, and probably of popular opinion.

It would be tempting, and satisfying, to lay the blame for this on the stupidity, cowardice and lack of principle that characterises the Parliamentary Conservative Party. There ought to be a new measure of political debasement (call it the Uxbridge and South Ruislip index) to describe MPs who, out of nothing but naked personal ambition, now say that they might be prepared to back the WA after all.

But the ghastliness of Tory MPs is matched, perhaps even superseded, by the abysmal quality of Opposition MPs. They have almost universally seen Brexit not as a liberation, an opportunity, a challenge, a problem, or a danger – or any of the other things you might choose to see it as – for the country but, instead, as an opportunity to promote their own, or their party’s, fortunes. The view of Jeremy Corbyn and his clique is clearly that they’d like Mrs May’s deal to go through, and then prove a disaster, so that he stands a chance of getting elected. This ignores the fact that the only reason Mrs May is still in her job, with approval ratings of minus 39 (a record) is that the Labour leader’s rating is minus 53. The view of most Labour MPs seems to be that they’d like to revoke it, while a scant majority of Labour voters want (or at least, used to want) to see it implemented.

The SNP, naturally, views the debate solely in terms of what it might mean for the prospects for independence, cheerfully picking and choosing from contradictory arguments about the will of the people, the necessity of abiding by referendum results and the difficulty of unpicking years of shared laws, regulation, industry and economic policy from political unions, as long as it suits their agenda.

What the Liberal Democrats, who ought to be polling at least 48 per cent, are doing, I have no idea. Except that Sir Vince Cable seems to have anticipated Mrs May’s novel policy of announcing a resignation but nonetheless staying in the job, getting in everyone’s way. The DUP seems to see the current chaos as a nice little earner.

But with the imminent (we can but hope) resignation of Mrs May, it is naturally the Conservative party that is getting attention. Yet the Prime Minister’s departure is what logicians would describe as necessary but not sufficient. If she’s only going to go if she gets her deal through, we’d have a new PM shackled by a deal which he or she didn’t devise, and probably detests – we know that because everybody except Mrs May detests it. For the Tory party there are the additional difficulties of finding a new leader who fulfills all the following criteria: pro-Brexit; capable of sorting out a dog’s dinner; not totally discredited already; and stands some chance of winning a general election.

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A lot of party members would also like the candidate to be a Tory, since all the non-Brexit policies introduced by the Government have been profoundly unConservative; unsurprisingly, since the manifesto on which they ran the last time was (according to independent political scientists) the most Left-wing since 1964.

You may, like so many people, have no sympathy with the Tories. Indeed, even those well-disposed towards the party have no reason to approve of the current shower, given their demonstrable failure to do any of the things that are supposed to be the Conservatives’ long suit; safeguarding the national interest, competently administering the economy, resisting useless and bossy legislation and so on. Since they are more divided than at any time since the arguments over the repeal of the Corn Laws, no civic-minded person should have any interest in keeping the party together; better for them, and us, to end their misery.

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Yet there remains the horrifying reality – as there is with the multitudinous Brexit options – that every other outcome looks even worse. We were supposed to be leaving the EU at 11 o’clock tonight in an orderly and friendly fashion, with everyone knowing exactly where we stood. Instead, Mrs May’s legacy is that we don’t know who will be prime minister tomorrow, or what lies in store for the country or for public discourse, which is more sharply divided than at any time in centuries. I may have understated how bad she is.