The prime minister increasingly looks as if she is in denial about the mess surrounding her which is starting to appear at the famous front door of No 10. Last week, despite conversations with senior parliamentarians, she remains stuck in a sort of time loop. We won't join a customs union or the single market, Article 50 will not be delayed, there will not be a second referendum and she cannot take no deal off the table. It might just as well be 17th January 2017 at Lancaster House. Confronted with reality for two years she has not changed her tune in the slightest.
There are just 68 days to go and she looks like a she has run out of ideas, if she ever had any in the first place. Some, and perhaps all, of her red lines will go in the next few days or weeks.
The Institute of Government (HERE) has a table showing major pieces of legislation that have to be in place before Brexit day. The timetable looks incredibly optimistic. One Bill is on Trade which is going through the Lords at the moment. The Lordships are threatening to block it (HERE) on Monday unless the government sets out in detail how future trade deals are to be scrutinised and agreed. Without the Trade Bill leaving in March is impossible we are told.
The Hansard Society's dashboard HERE indicates we are running well behind schedule for the Statutory Instruments that are needed to make the UK statute book work. Of the 800 needed just 322 have been laid before parliament and only 76 have been completed their passage. A weekly rate that started last June at 20 per week is now at over 35 per week. In the month since Christmas the government managed just 34, a quarter of the required target.
I really don't believe the government is anywhere near ready to leave on March 29th and we desperately need a transition period. The private sector is even less prepared.
Manufacturing industry, financial services and now the farming community (HERE) are all issuing warnings about the disruption that would come in any no deal scenario.
We learn that Dominic Grieve and a group of MPs (HERE) are planning to table amendments on Monday that would force a no deal outcome to be ruled out. This, we learn from Robert Peston HERE, has the support of quite a few cabinet ministers.
Peston writes that, "the calamity for May's opposition to no-deal is not just that a majority of backbench MPs would support one or both of these motions - which are likely to be put to the vote on 29 January - but that significant numbers of her own ministers would feel obliged to defy her will and also support them."
He says cabinet ministers think 20 or more of their colleagues would rebel against a no deal policy and that the PM couldn't sack them all without destabilising her entire government.
To add to her difficulties Conservative party activists don't think much of the deal and Camilla Tominey at The Telegraph HERE says if she 'betrays' Brexit the party will be consigned to oblivion. Needless to say, if she doesn't betray it the party will also be consigned to oblivion. Tominey is a right wing harridan often seen on TV dispensing nonsense to people who don't know any better.
To help things along and increase the pressure nicely on the PM, Liam Fox has an article in The Telegraph HERE warning of a 'political tsunami' if Brexit isn't delivered. It sounds like he is very close to calling for an uprising unless he expects a tidal wave of some sort down Whitehall.
Polls at Conservative Home show 8 in 10 party members oppose extending Article 50 (HERE) and 9 in 10 oppose a second referendum (HERE). Her own party is also opposed to the deal. Just 15% support it as it stands (HERE) and a narrow majority would accept it only if we could leave the backstop unilaterally - good luck with that one.
Wherever you look, in cabinet, parliament, the party, the EU and across industry, all you can see are problems piling up. She has created every one by failing to lead or to be honest about the huge problems of Brexit. Worse than that she has consistently put off the really difficult decisions so that we are now faced with a constitutional disaster likely to play out over the next few weeks.
The course she herself set is locked in but she cannot go forward, or backward, she can tack neither towards a soft Brexit or a hard Brexit. A national calamity awaits us with Theresa May's name on it.
