May still thinks she’s getting somewhere, which makes her humiliation only more cruel

When it was announced that Theresa May’s statement today would be delayed due to a “lack of power” in No10, Twitter chortled at what sounded like an omen. But when the prime minister appeared, she was in no mood for gags.

Fresh from her appalling humiliation in Salzburg, where EU leaders took it in turns to excoriate the weakness and unworkability of her Brexit plan, May gave a terse statement, whose brevity and naked aggression expressed with ringing eloquence the depth of her personal defeat.

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