IF you want a microcosm of how fat-headed and foolish these past few months in British politics have become, contemplate this. As many as 30 Tory MPs have told the Telegraph newspaper they are now prepared to back Theresa May’s deal – on the condition that she leaves Downing Street and makes way for whatever grotesque successor the Conservative Party decides to foist on the nation.

Thirty votes puts barely a dent in the 149-strong majority of MPs which voted down the Prime Minister’s deal just last week – but ignore that inconvenient fact for a tick. Consider instead the desperate shallowness of the political thinking behind this volte-face. Consider what it tells us about the state of British politics.

Let me get this right: honourable and right honourable members, you trooped through the division lobbies twice. You twice voted against this withdrawal agreement – and, heaven knows, raised your voice in the Commons chamber explaining your reasons why. You’ve now decided you can choke down this bitter pill after all, so long as Downing Street gets a new tenant in Michael Gove or Boris Johnson.

This despite the fact that – whether or not Theresa May is Prime Minister – the text of the withdrawal agreement will continue to say what it says? This despite the fact that May’s presence or absence from high office will change not one clause or curlicue of the EU treaty she has negotiated, and which has remained substantively unaltered since it was first published on November 25 last year?

I give up.

This is unpolitics. Politics as performance art – superficial, inconsistent, unprincipled, a gig for conscious charlatans, ham actors and empty suits. From the beginning, the Brexit saga has been mis-orchestrated by politicians and the wider media as a battle of wills between individuals, determined only by their leadership ambitions, petty vanities and outsized personalities.

It is the easier tale to tell – but it is almost always a complete distraction. It stains every part of this story, whether it is diehard Remainers lionising John Bercow for his grandiloquent bitching at Andrea Leadsom in the Commons, or the Brexit crowd crowning Jacob Rees-Mogg as the authentic voice of the plain people of Britain.

In this respect, the Prime Minister is as guilty as anyone. The look Theresa May was aiming for was, I suppose, royal blue steel. Flanked by two Union flags in an oak-lined bunker, Theresa May addressed the nation this week. It was, as has become characteristic, a deeply strange performance with all the empathy of a breeze block and the emotion of a rusting girder.

There is nothing more ridiculous than someone straining in every sinew in their face to appear deathly serious. You wondered, for a moment, if Jim Traynor had covertly taken over as Downing Street’s director of communications. In tai chi terms, the Prime Minister assumed the Scolding Governess stance and proceeded to box MPs’ ears.

“Of this I am absolutely sure,” she said. “You the public have had enough. You are tired of the infighting. You are tired of the political games and the arcane procedural rows. You want this stage of the Brexit process to be over and done with. I agree. I am on your side. It is now time for MPs to decide.”

The performance recalled former United States Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell, who memorably recorded a campaign ad with the immortal message: “I’m not a witch. I’m you.” O’Donnell lost her Delaware race by 50,159 votes.

The Prime Minister doesn’t enjoy people. I don’t blame her for that. But when you are in the influence-peddling business, when the bread and butter of your professional life is changing minds and advocating a case, this is a considerable weakness. May’s human suit was a beta model in testing when she took office in 2016. Fundamental flaws with the software have now been identified.

The logic of the Prime Minister’s statement – like the halfwit Tory MPs considering voting for her deal if she terminates her premiership – is profoundly unpolitical.

Instead of good-faith disagreements on substantive issues, her opponents are framed as vain and self-indulgent pettifoggers, addicted to process, with no serious cause for complaint about the accord she struck with Brussels. In respect of many MPs, this indictment is obviously cynical and obviously unfair.

I voted for the UK to Remain in the EU three years ago. Nothing that has happened since has shaken that judgment. I still don’t want Scotland to leave the single market and customs union. I don’t want the rest of the UK to leave either. I don’t accept there is any kind of Brexit which leaves any part of this country better off. There is no “jobs-first Brexit”, however many times the leader of the opposition rattles off this nifty cliche.

As a Scottish nationalist, any short-term boost for independence which might arise from Britain’s chaotic departure from the EU will be counter-balanced by a new series of challenges about how to argue for independence and how to govern if independence is won.

THESE challenges are not insuperable, but a political trajectory where the rest of the UK is outside of the EU without a deal and an independent Scotland wishes to become an EEA or EU state raises stark, politically untested questions for advocates of independence.

At the very least, it shreds key elements of the 2014 prospectus.

Whether or not these issues would become the focus of a new independence campaign isn’t the only important question.

If you win, you have to know what the hell you’re going to do. Fail to reckon with reality? Well, just look at the bourach in Westminster and Whitehall. Nobody wants a new state to be launched on a rip-tide of incompetence.

If you don’t believe in Brexit, May’s deal is a bad deal. Rejecting it is entirely understandable. For SNP members, doing so reflects the democratic mandate the people of Scotland have given them. But if you embrace the popular mandate for Britain to leave the EU, doesn’t Theresa May have a point, however clunky and malign her speech was?

Aren’t Jeremy Corbyn and his colleagues havering away in fantasy land, trying to have it every which way as the last sand slips through the hourglass?

The National: Does Jeremy Corbyn know what his problem is with the proposed Brexit deal?Does Jeremy Corbyn know what his problem is with the proposed Brexit deal?

Months after its publication, with a Brexit cliff-edge looming, strikingly few Labour MPs can give you convincing reasons why they reject May’s deal, beyond often synthetic concerns about “separating” Northern Ireland from the rest of the Union.

This week, Wansbeck MP and Labour chairman Ian Lavery told reporters that “we want Brexit, but we want the Labour Brexit”.

The hour grows late for this kind of nonsense. Emotionally, Theresa May needed to give these Labour MPs a bridge. Instead, she decided to torch it. That was a fatal error. But the critique of their bad-faith havers? There’s more than a ghost of truth in what she says.

There are plenty of good reasons to evict Theresa May from Downing Street. She is the wrong person, leading the country in the wrong direction at the wrong time.

Her personal deficiencies – her bad judgment, bad strategy, her bull-headed obstinacy and lack of imagination – contributed significantly to the current impasse. Her administration and her party have been crushed, slowly and painfully, under the weight of its contradictions. But Theresa May is not the author of these contradictions, merely someone who has tried and failed to navigate them. Eliminate May, and we will be spared the spectacle of her torturing herself, the lectern and the English language – but the contradictions will remain to devour any successor.