PM’s over-riding priority is getting her bad deal passed by MPs

It recognises something that has been almost inevitable since May 2017, when Theresa May failed to increase the Tory majority of 2015 — indeed she lost that majority.

Much of politics, particularly within the Conservative Party, has been in denial since that disastrous outcome.

The reality is that Mrs May is not able to get the Brexit of her party’s 2017 manifesto, of the UK leaving the single market and customs union, through the House of Commons. But she is cannot get anything much softer past her own party.

The net result of that contradiction is the horrendous contortions of the Withdrawal Agreement (WA), which the UK will have difficulty exiting, with its backstop, which could yet be the slow beginning of the end of the United Kingdom.

But while Theresa May’s call for a short extension to get her WA through parliament is a recognition of the impossible mathematics of the current Commons, and her call to open dialogue with Jeremy Corbyn is likewise, we need to be clear what it seems to mean — that for all the warnings about the backstop, so overwhelmingly shared among Tories, and for all Mrs May’s previous comment that ‘no deal’ was better than a bad deal, and that there were certain types of internal UK border that no prime minister could accept, she seems finally to have decided that placating EU-Irish intransigence on the backstop to get the WA through is her over-riding priority.

It has been clear for more than a year that unionism is in a bad place. There are still two nuclear options. Both the ERG group of Tory eurosceptics and the DUP can, via the same route, bring down the government, but if the former does so it is likely the end of the Conservative Party as it is now.

That Jacob-Rees Mogg pointed out last night that there was a Cabinet majority against the PM’s approach suggests that the ERG is seeing if there is a way of thwarting Mrs May’s new tactics short of collapsing the administration.