This upset leaves Brexit in a state of paralysis

A wounded Government somehow has to keep negotiating with Brussels – and produce a Budget

There is a famous perversion of the expression “it is always darkest just before the dawn” – sometimes attributed to Mao Zedong – which goes “it is always darkest just before it is completely black”. I thought of this when watching – like much of the rest of the nation, with a mixture of horror and pity – Theresa May’s vacuous and accident-riddled party conference speech this week.

For although it might seem that things couldn’t possibly get any worse for Britain’s beleaguered leader, there is a very strong possibility that they will and, furthermore, that she will end up taking the whole country into the same black hole of despond with her.

There has long been virtually no chance of an outline divorce settlement being agreed in time for the meeting of European leaders a couple of weeks from now. Jean-claude Juncker, the European Commission president, has said it would require “miracles”, and by the look of it, there are none to be had.

But there was a general expectation, after Mrs May’s conciliatory speech in Florence, that the impasse might indeed be resolved for the following meeting in December, allowing the process to move onto transitional and future trading arrangements. After this week’s theatrics, any such certainty, fragile as it always was, has vanished.

A security breach, a coughing fit and the quite literal disintegration of the conference’s supposedly defining message – these things shouldn’t matter. But for their symbolism, they plainly do. Ever since her ill-fated decision to call a snap election, this is a leader who appears completely jinxed, helplessly stumbling from one disaster to the next.

The working assumption had been that Mrs May would remain in situ at least until the end of the Article 50 process, yet it is hard to imagine now that she will. The same applies to what type of Brexit Britain is hoping to achieve. An uneasy consensus had been established around the Treasury approach of a two-year transition, during which not much would change, followed by a bespoke trading agreement that would ensure privileged access to Europe’s internal market. With May mortally wounded, that, too, is up in the air. We are back at square one; the Europeans know neither who they are dealing with or what Britain wants. An already shaky process has been further destabilised.

Into this almighty mess steps next month’s Budget, cruelly sandwiched between the Brexit flashpoints of the October and December EU Council meetings. The intensity of these events, following one on another, creates boundless scope for more political upsets.

Philip Hammond’s last Budget in March was a total disaster, on a par in some respects with the debacle of the Conservative Party manifesto, whose proposals for social care reform arguably lost Mrs May her majority. The Budget was destroyed by a similarly untested policy – increased national insurance for the self employed, the money thereby raised earmarked, ironically, for extra spending on social care.

Hammond is already severely constrained in what he can do by a weakening economy and the lack of a parliamentary majority. The national insurance debacle will make him doubly cautious, further limiting the scope for policies that might help revive the Government’s fortunes or address myriad challenges for the UK economy beyond Brexit.

It might have been better not to have had a Budget at all, leaving the Government’s options open and Hammond with the flexibility to respond to the financial and economic turbulence that could result from a breakdown in Brexit talks in December. But the die is cast and the date is set. Come what may, Hammond must deliver his Budget.

If the Government were a corporation, Mrs May would already have been put out of her misery, clinically dispatched with a bumper pay-off to sugar the pill. In any company, it soon becomes obvious when someone is not up to the job.

Her likely successor as chief executive would be Mr Hammond, who the board of directors would be almost duty-bound to appoint, despite the failings of the last Budget. As both a former foreign secretary and defence secretary, his European contacts are better than anyone’s. He also has a much better grasp of commercial realities than almost anyone else in the Cabinet. A deal that as far as possible protects British exports, as well as the golden goose of the City tax machine, is for him paramount, as it would be for the CEO of any well-run company.

But this is politics, not business, and Mr Hammond is completely unacceptable to hard Brexiteers. The gifted amateurism and naked ambition of Boris Johnson, populist and uplifting in its appeal, is equally unacceptable to much of the parliamentary party. We seem to have reached a state of political paralysis, with potentially dire consequences for the future of Brexit, the economy and the country. There will at least be one person rubbing his hands with glee – Jeremy Corbyn.